Dammit that is troubling, has anyone else ran a timer on this thing yet?
I know it was 35 seconds (on average) from the moment you pressed the shower button to when the safe room doors would open. Now the fastest time I’ve clocked is 66 seconds (88% increase) with the longest being 115 seconds (228%)
Sidenote: they say they’ve fixed the multiple clayton exploit and yet I had a 2nd one join a run I did last night (unless that’s a different Clayton glitch being refrenced on the Trello board)
They deactivated the card so the effect isn’t kicking in anymore.
Duplicates are a different thing, you only have to spam A at the last second during the 30 second-countdown when you join a game in loading-screen/progress. They won’t fix that since they introduce duplicates along with their stupid seperation with OP5.
Mod edit: Please don’t bypass censor filter.
Gotta love bandaid fixes.
I knew there was a reason I woke up feeling depressed about Gears today, yesterday was just full of horrible experiences: exploiters, hackers in versus, glitches, lag fests, the insufferable escape timer, etc. It was like I was seeing everyone else’s issues with the game for the first time.
Don’t even get me started with the decoupling and duplicates for OP5, I am totally against the direction they’re taking with that and I really hope they prove me wrong somehow
Yeah gears is getting really bad and unplayable. The fun is gone and it doesn’t look like it’ll get better any time soon.
Call this foolish or excessively optimistic but my hope is that OP5 will right the ship (despite my misgivings about decoupling and duplicates)
I wish I could share in your optimism but TC has been destroying players hopes for a while. I don’t know if you can right the ship of your on the Titanic!
It’s probably just a sunk cost fallacy at this point but my optimism is based on the expectation that TC should have had to invest most of their time, personnel, and resources into Operation 5 being the big Series X|S launch update not only for multiplayer but also the campaign and the issues we’re seeing at the moment are because of that
Why it’s AWESOME! Gave me plenty of time to make coffees, sandwiches and take craps while contemplating my life. 
I just noticed @HerrKatzchen’s post on the thread where higher level unlocks was first announced in which a very inaccurate twitter user says that less than 500 users are affected by the level reset and that it’s the only way for everything to work correctly.
It’s bad to erase players progress already. That is unforgivable.
Still I thought that was as far as it went.
So to say that is the only way it can work now adds a LIE!!!
If levels beyond 18 can’t work then they better not go into Operation 5 or anywhere ever!!!
Still we know that they’re comming because:
a) they can work
b) they did work
So therefore they could’ve honestly just left this alone and allowed them to continue to work.
I suspect that the concern was that the event listeners for level 19 reached and level 20 reached would never fire if they occurred int he past for users.
So stripping levels is one way to handle that but it is NOT the only way.
I’m a software engineer so I’m not speculating or wishful thinking.
I can tell them exactly how if they honestly don’t know and are willing to abstain from harming users.
Other ways include…
Manually iterating of these less than 500 users that they mentioned and either correcting their data in the database OR find all on those users characters for the set of characters over level 18 and explicitly firing the appropriate level achieved events.
There 
is 2 more ways above and beyond the “only way” LIE
A 3rd way… a way that given all that we’ve seen from TC would be to ensure that all level achieve listeners were idempotent and then have characters refire those events for all levels achieved routinely.
I’d probably also add a call for other corrections which could be an empty function which they could push updates for to fix future things that they haven’t screwed up yet but are going to.
There now 3 ways - NOT an ONLY way but 4 total where the way I despise erases players progress and causes harm.
I was angry about the harm but the lie honestly is even worse.
My speculation could be dead wrong regarding what they’re concerned about and it may be tempting to point out the true reality that made hurting players the “only way” but tell me what’s really going on and if I can’t figure out a way to protect what people earned with their time then TC’s code or infrastructure is beyond hopelessly awful and they should fire everyone who worked so hard to make such an impossible to maintain / destructive pile of entropic malevolence.
Honestly, at this point I’m just curious how the future of Gears is going to be. This apparent patch that should help for the Series X in my eyes just made everything worse. It brought back a lot of old bugs and made loading certain things a lot worse than it was. It introduced things that were not meant to be introduced and possibly other things we do not even know about yet.
I’m really curious about the OP5 patch now. It’s got to be a really big thing, and a good big thing because if it aint, then I see pretty dark not only for the company, but actually also for the franchise. And the recent patches really don’t get my hopes up at all. But, you never know.
I agree, operation 5 is huge. Literally and figuratively. I don’t have a lot of confidence with TC’s track record of how smooth and accurate things go.
I don’t know if I see dark for the company or not. 343 is still around after savaging Halo so it would appear that Microslop backed companies can ruin franchises with impunity.
My guess is that the franchise as we know it is over though - the only character I can play who will still gain xp is Emile and Kat which was bad enough before seeing the lie which makes me feel sick to even think about playing now.
I just hope beyond hope that if TC does face consequences for their awfulness and ends up changing their name again (formerly Tusk) then I can learn of it before wasting any money or time on whatever random atrocity they are committing. The money will be no big deal but the time… Especially with the joy they take in forcing an endless grind. Never again please!!!
I’m going print some labels with the TC logo on them then go out to my camper and stick them on all of my propane lanterns. I’m going to do this because the thing that TC does best right now is gaslighting 
So here’s the thing.
If you’re unable to not play a character for about a month and focus on other modes/characters, then I assume that as soon as the lvl.20 update hits, you’re going to be playing them a lot anyway. Which means you’ll get to lvl.20 again pretty quickly by just… playing the way you want.
Sounds like you’re crying over spilled milk, man. It’s a minor inconvenience at worst.
I haven’t seen anyone mention this but I think it may be possible to get compensation out of this. Like a global XP bonus, starting from Op 5. Even for those players who had Level 19-20 characters but continued playing, only to be stuck to have their character level revert back to 18.
Bold hopes considering most screwups from TC have resulted in a mess of a ‘fix’ for something that was not a problem.
There was XP bonus that was up for short while, that wasn’t meant to be released. That could have been reserved for beginning of Op 5.
I’ll keep my doubts until proven otherwise, thanks very much. And won’t there be a 14 years of Gears thing in November which would more or less conveniently go with the Op 5 launch?
They’re definitely going to have XP events come Halloween/Christmas, I wouldn’t worry about it too much honestly.
I only played one character after the update and only got him to 18.75. I’ll get that XP back easy. I’m not crying over “spilled milk.”
I’m stating that I’m sick and tired of TC’s ridiculousness with a franchise I used to adore. This “oops” has been handled in the weirdest, most consumer non-friendly manner. But it’s just par the course for TC.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. Every time TC touches this game with an update or a “fix,” they break more than they fix. That statement used to be a joke, and now it’s just a frikkin fact. You never know what crap you’re going to deal with post TC fiddling.
I respectfully disagree.
You’re factually accurate that destroying a small amount of players progress is a minor inconvenience.
If you accidentally spill my milk then I will forgive you and move on.
But… if you dump my milk over my head several times in a row and the lie to my face and tell me it was the only way it could work I’m going to feel like you don’t have my best interests at hart and I’m going to distrust you and feel uncomfortable about you whenever we play.
Consider that with the fact that whenever any of us play and we are in TC’s house so to speak then we are always at risk of more milk dumps and lies. There is no just playing with people we trust - we’re always playing with TC even if our other team mates are friends that don’t intentionally hurt us then lie about it like TC just has.
This is not the first or second time that they’ve knee jerk executed poorly thought out decisions that harm players when other options were available so it doesn’t look innocent anymore it looks nefarious.
All my characters are 18th except for the ones with woefully poor card selections and I play this game for the PVE. Telling me not to play is not an act of goodwill.
Telling not to play how I enjoy may be apropos for a person that dumps my milk in my hair or lap but it’s annoying at the very least.
In conclusion a minor inconvenience from an accident is fine when the commiter of the accident is remorseful and tries to learn from their mistake. But now that the commiter of the “accident” has kept on doing inconvenient things for over a year and will go on twitter and lie and say it was the only way that it could work then it doesn’t seem like an accident any more. It’s a pattern now. It’s almost reliable. You can almost bet that there’s going to be bugs in 5, some will be painful. You can almost bet that something is going to get nerfed quickly and possibly with no warning. There’s a strong chance that they may back some or all of it out again. I say those things from memory not imagination. You are almost certain to get some more milk spilled with Operation 5 and there will be no sense crying over that either but if you love the game and have been playing for years then eventually you’re going to get enough milk in your lap to recognize that it’s manufacturer doesn’t love you in any acceptable way and you may want cry shenanigans yourself or just walk away. Either way - we have no reason to believe that this is the last glass of milk my friend and so many little inconvenience that look mean spirited and disrespectful add up to too freaking much eventually.