Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, tore through his company’s fan forums last week, promising at least nine times that Gears of War 2’s various matchmaking woes would be fixed soon.

Normally, we wouldn’t run a story based a random forum post from a game developer, but our interest was piqued this time by the sheer volume of posts that Rein put out. He’s also known for being pretty hands-on in the forums, so we have little reason to doubt the validity of these posts.

Rein’s remarks ranged from the quick, "Relax folks. We’ll make it right," to the more heartfelt, "We appreciate that you bought the game and we’re working hard to make sure that we make improvements to the game that make you feel you got excellent value for the money."

We’ve previously reported how matchmaking problems persisted even after Epic released a title update at the end of last month. It was meant to fix long wait times for multiplayer, particularly for parties of one or four, but TGR staff and many others have still been having issues. There also haven’t been any gameplay tweaks since the game was released on November 7.

Rein stopped short of offering anything definitive. "This post confirms that we’ll continue to make improvements to the game," he said, responding to a poster who asked whether Epic would address gripes with the game’s shotgun and chainsaw. "We can’t make feature-by-feature promises until we know for sure what has been completed."

For the record, here are the occasions where Rein spoke about an update:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

TGR pinged a Microsoft spokesman on these forum posts, and he only responded that a title update was released on November 27 and that there are no announcements to make about additional updates.