If the multiplayer aspect of Gears was a massive let down for you, with the constant “Connection lost to host” message plaguing your enjoyment, then you really should learn how to program and work on it your damn self if you’re so fussy. That’s roughly what Mark Rein thinks anyway, and welcomes anyone to do just that: join the Epic team.

We heard just recently that Phil Spencer wants to see Halo 2 matchmaking in all games, as he feels it would do XBL the power of good. Gears, naturally, would have been no exception, but alas we have to put up with what we have.

From the official Gears forums:

There are never enough people to do all the tasks we’d like to do. It isn’t realistic to suggest that we could integrate thousands of lines of 3-year-old Halo2 source code into Gears of War and have working Halo2-style lobby functionality in any reasonable period of time. It would be far more efficient for us to develop it ourselves but unfortunately this is a multiple-man-year effort and, as I indicated above, we’re short on the people it would take to do something like this in a timeframe that makes it worthwhile. It certainly isn’t for lack of desire, lack of effort to try to find those people, or lack of funds. Trust me - we’ve been trying to find people to do things like this since long before we completed Gears.

The ideal solution is for us to hire people to do this within our own walls which, as you can see, is something we’re trying our best to accomplish. If you know people who are capable of getting hired to do the job - please send them our way and they’ll be well rewarded and part of a great team working on great projects. See previous post.

We’re already working steadily on various Gears enhancements and we would love to have even more people dedicated to ongoing Gears of War support projects because we clearly see the benefits of those. But hiring people who meet Epic’s quality bar is an extremely slow process. The next best solution, and one that would benefit all Xbox 360 games (as Phil Spencer suggested), would be for Microsoft to build the functionality into Xbox Live. It seems to me that doing so would be a smart competitive advantage for them and a way to reinvest some of the money they’ve spent on Halo in a way that benefits the entire platform more than any individual game ever could.

It’s an interesting invitation, and if you don’t mind moving to North Carolina and you are a programmer, it could be a great move for you. Even better if you already live in North Carolina of course. And if you manage to please millions of gamers by changing the matchmaking for the better, then you know that you have done a good job!

Thanks Lotus 111s for submitting.