It seemed to take a while, probably because there was so much waiting involved, but Epic just released a "title update" to ease Gears of War 2’s matchmaking woes.

Previously, online battles were slow to start for some players including myself, taking up to 10 minutes if they ever got past that dreaded "Remote parties restarted the matchmaking process" message. Epic forum moderator Rod Fergusson announced that’s a thing of the past, particularly for single player and four-player party situations.

Fergusson warns that some of these changes will be immediate, while others "will play out over several days as our update enables us to reduce player segmentation by reducing the number of servers required to do matchmaking," whatever that means. The bottom line is there will be more available matches to join, thus reducing the wait times.

A couple other updates are included as well. Stat collection at gearsofwar.com has been improved to prevent data loss, and a rare bug is fixed where players couldn’t start the story-based campaign when Live was down or unavailable.

If you’re reading this in the midst of holiday weekend gaming marathon and haven’t bothered to turn off your console since last night, you’ll want to restart it now. Otherwise, you won’t see the update and you’ll be separated from everyone who’s getting on board. Obviously, that’s just going to make matters worse.

The original Gears of War was plagued with similar issues out of the gate. Unlike Turkey Day, I’m not thrilled with this tradition, but let’s at least give thanks for what we’re getting now.