If you fire up Splinter Cell: Double Agent today, then you will find that the game requires an update. The game did get an excellent review, but it seems like some people experienced some online problems. The patch that Ubisoft released today seems to fix all those problems, most of the fixes are for the online multiplayer mode.

Connections issues
• Fix some connection issues when the host has ended the session.
• Fix the de-connections in the lobby
• Once the lobby reaches 5 or 6 people, random players drop.
• After kicking the 6th player from a team, the leader couldn’t invite another player
• Fixed a case where the group leader hang in the “joining session” screen if the host quits while he is joining.
• Improvement of the server’s selection so that the server is more reactive.
• If a player leaves a session immediately when he arrives and they are some packet loss (he is in a resolving state), the resolving time out is not reset and in the next session he will kick all the players as soon as he arrives !!!!
• Only 1 disconnect function to each peer when resolving is timed out

Lag-related issues
• In-game freezing : treat a limited number of Unreal packets per frame to avoid freezes in some specific conditions.
• Increased network thread priority over Sound thread that can reduce lag issues.
• Fix the case when a player got flashbanged while lagging as a mercenary; the player can remain permanently flashbanged until the player reboot the game.
• Fix FPS loss due to a sound problem.

Others issues
• A new GameVersion to avoid LAN matchs between master and update versions
• The loading video was always the same, now it’s changed at random
• Fixed a bug on the score calculation of the Maxpercent challenge.
• Challenge Best score is wrong if the player has just beaten it.
• Improved checks to avoid accessing an invalid leaderboard
• Allows to write leaderboards of live challenges

Ubisoft did their job by delivering a multiplayer patch to fix all the online problems, now we’re only waiting again for Treyarch to fix their online problems with Call of Duty 3 and for Epic to fix their online problems with Gears of War.