Recently, we’ve been monitoring an issue in the “Ranked” playlist where players are seeing their playlist-specific skill rank being reset to level 1 throughout the course of play. In order to resolve this issue, we’ll be resetting the skill ranks for all players within the “Ranked” playlist on Friday, January 15, 2010 at 12:00 PM PST (what time is that in my city?). We will also be letting everyone know through an update of the multiplayer Message of the Day at that time. Now don’t panic! We’re NOT resetting your overall progress or any other part of your accumulated stats. Your skill rank ONLY exists in the Ranked playlist and it is the number displayed between your level and your PSN ID – your level and the cash you’ve accumulated to date won’t change at all. After the skill rank reset, all players should start seeing their skill rank increase (or decrease) normally. We’ll be keeping an eye on things to make sure all is working as expected. Read more...

Hey everybody – a little while ago, we posted a poll here on NaughtyDog.com asking what playlists you would be interested in. The top two results were a “Plunder Only” playlist and two variations on a “Crushing” playlist. Well, we have some good news! Based on this poll and other collected community input we have decided to try a couple things out. This weekend we are instituting a “Plunder Only” playlist based on the overwhelming feedback and we’re making one other (temporary) change as well. Rather than add two new playlists at once we are going to try an experiment. For this Experimental Weekend only, player health in ALL game types will be lowered to 65% of the current player health. This is exactly the same as the Crushing settings, only Boosters will still be allowed. The experimental weekend will run from Friday, December 4 at 10:00 AM PST (what time is that in my city?) through Monday, December 7 at 11:00 AM PST Read more...

Reading over forums, blog comments and Tweets, we wanted to talk a bit about Skill level and the Ranked playlist. Skill is only counted for games played in the specific Ranked playlist. Your performance in the other playlists has no effect whatsoever on your Skill level. Another thing to be aware of – the only thing that the Skill level takes into account is wins and losses. The number of headshots you got, or even kill to death ratio doesn’t affect the Skill level. The game tries to create balanced teams based on the Skills of the players placed in the game. The game also tries to keep parties together, so it will not split up players that are in a party together no matter what their Skill levels are. It isn’t fun to play in games that are complete blow outs, both for the winners and the losers, thus the Skill system is designed such that it moves excellent players out of the lower Skill levels quickly in order to get them into more interesting games against Read more...

We put up a new poll on the front page today inviting you to give us feedback on what you’d like to see for a future playlist within the Multiplayer mode of UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves. To help with that, I got Justin Richmond, our multiplayer designer, to give us some more information on the different modes in the poll. Here is what he sent over: We have been playing multiplayer furiously here in the office and it’s great to see you all online racking up the Cash and Skill Levels. Now we are looking to the future. To that end we are putting up a poll to see the possible directions you as players would be interested in seeing for our future playlists. We are listing five options in the poll, and below is a short breakdown about each one. Plunder Only All Plunder, all the time. No variations, nothing but capping treasure and shooting enemies. Crushing: All Game Types The Crushing variation on all maps with all game types. Crushing is a more hardcore version Read more...

Hope you are all having fun playing UNCHARTED 2! We are constantly evaluating our multiplayer and plan updating it on a regular basis. Earlier today, we updated our multiplayer matchmaking playlists. Justin, our multiplayer designer, passed along the following update notes to us. New playlists have been added, and the Deathmatch playlist has been modified. Below is the full list of playlist selections in multiplayer matchmaking: Deathmatch: Now contains ONLY straight Deathmatch matches (no variations) Elimination: Elimination matches only Objectives: All Objective based game types Ranked: Objective and Deathmatch game types, Skill Level tracked All Competitive Modes: Every Competative and Obective game type, including Deathmatch variations Co-op Objective: You and your friends take the world Co-op Arena: Survive the onslaught! Read more...