When Texas Hold 'em launched on the Xbox Live Arcade earlier this year, excitement over a free game turned quickly to disappointment over a painfully clunky experience. Tomorrow, the game gets a "do over".
Torturously slow animations, matchmaking glitches and rampant cheating exploits made people wish they could get refunds for free games and kept many poker fans, like me, from playing at all. The broken promise of Vision camera support was probably a lucky break for some of us, but that too turned some players away.
If you launch the title tomorrow morning, you will be prompted to accept an auto update that hopes to fix many of the problems plaguing Texas Hold 'em. The patch won't address the camera support just yet, but you can look forward to obscene video early next year.
According to Major Nelson, here is what the auto-update will do:
- Game-play has been sped up.
- Post the blind and play right away! – Players can now, if they wish, start playing immediately when joining a table by posting the big blind, rather than having to wait for the blind to come to them.
- New ‘Away’ mode – Players can now set their status to ‘Away’. Hands will be auto-folded and blinds auto-posted until the player returns.
- New ‘Auto-boot’ mode – Players who continuously let the timer expire (more than three times in a game) will be booted from the table
- Faster overall pacing – Timers and messaging durations have been adjusted to speed up game-play among experienced players, but still allow novice players plenty of time to play.
- Improved blind structure – Initial blinds, as well as blind increases, are now more proportional to table stakes, ensuring more meaningful increases during game-play.
- Matchmaking improvements – Players are no longer matched into games they cannot afford
- Improved interface controls – Improvements to controls, such as increasing/decreasing stake amounts
- Leaderboard display – A player’s full winnings and rank are now properly displayed
- Art and text improvements – Game art and spelling issues have been addressed
- Online exploits addressed – Certain known exploits that enabled cheating have been addressed. As a result, the online multi-player leaderboards will be reset to eliminate inflated scores as a result of these exploits.
