Big Team Battle mode pitches two teams of 12 players against each other - or at least it’s meant to. Most of its issues are with its matchmaking, which fails to find matches for larger strike teams, causes players to drop, or places them in games with mismatched team sizes. It reportedly still works some of the time and Halo Infinite has continued to assign players Challenges which rely on BTB mode - irking those that can’t play further. “As you know, we’ve been dealing with some frustrating issues with BTB nearly since launch and despite a few attempts at solving and mitigating before the holiday break, we were not able to get this fixed,” begins the update from the development team. “While BTB has remained playable, there are matchmaking issues that increase with more players and larger fireteams have a low chance of successfully joining into a game together.” “A strike force continued to work on this over the break and we’re optimistic to say we believe we have a fix in hand for the core issue. This went into QA last week and so far it’s looking positive - we are not seeing this issue occur internally using this build.” The next step they say is to move into the “certification process” before that patch is released. “It’s a little too soon to give an ETA yet but please know our goal is to release this as soon as we can while ensuring it doesn’t have any other unintended impact to the retail product. It won’t be this week, but we hope it’s not too much further out and we’ll share an update as soon as we have line of sight on a release date (once we clear ‘cert’ we are then ready to ship).” Once BTB is fixed, the post says, 343 Industries will turn their attention to other multiplayer issues - including “cheating or wonkiness with the ranked experience.” Brendy was a big fan of the multiplayer in his Halo Infinite multiplayer review, and he mentioned to me later that BTB was his favourite. Although when I say it like that it sounds like I’m making it up. I swear, he did! He was very cross it was broken. Also he said I was handsome.
