The Scorched Earth Tournament for RO2 has the final 4 teams closing in on the big prize money – a total of $12,000. With the Superbowl out of the way, this week we have the divisional play-offs for Scorched Earth, to find the best team in Europe and the best in North America. The two winning teams will progress to the grand final for the shot at the World Title and the big cash prize!

First up, on Wed 8th Feb, at 8pm in the UK [9pm Central European, 3pm Eastern], is the European Division Championship match where Enclave face off against DoublePenetration. Both teams have put out some old favorites, so we’ll see which of them makes it to the World Championship match!

And, following up on Sun 12th Feb, at 9pm Eastern [6pm Pacific, in the wee small hours of Friday morning in Europe], we have the North American Division Championship. Team Chaos take on Hardcore North America for the title – and their own shot at the big prize.

The matches will be broadcast live (with a small delay just in case anyone needs to bleep out a nipple slip, or stray middle finger). Details HERE: http://www.forgottenhonor.com/scorchedearth/live/livestream/. And the hashtag for the twitter conversation will be #fhscorchedearth. Get tweeting!

Get out there and support your team – the hono(u)r of whole cultures is at stake here! Along with $12,000…

Discuss on the forums ->

Now, while we sincerely hope that no-one ever gets a crash in RO2, ever, we are realistic and do know that it will happen from time to time. In the past, we’ve always asked for crash logs and other info – after the next RO2 update, it will be automated for you.
It should be straight-forward enough, if it happens to you – and it will make our QA department’s life much simpler, too. So, don’t worry, it is NOT some evil virus!

For more details, see the forum post ->

We’re pleased to announce the release of the modding and map making tools for Red Orchestra 2, available free to everyone that owns Red Orchestra 2. While the limited functionality preview versions of the SDK have been available to select modders for a while, this release now makes the full capabilities of the Mod SDK available to everyone. Users can now make and publish everything from simple mods and mutators, through custom maps and on to full total conversion mods.

Modders and map makers have been hard at work with the pre-release SDK and several great maps and mods are already coming together. For a preview of what is to come, check out these three total conversion mods already in production for Red Orchestra 2:

Rising Storm – http://www.risingstormgame.com/
In Country Vietnam – http://www.incountrymod.com/
Iron Europe – http://www.ironeuropegame.com/

And to check out all of the latest custom maps, mods, and content head on over to the modding section of the Tripwire Interactive forums:

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/forumdisplay.php?f=83

There are also a bunch of updates to the main game – see the discussion thread below:

Discuss on the forums ->

By most business measures Red Orchestra 2 has been a smashing success for Tripwire Interactive. Within 2 days of the launch of the game it had surpassed the lifetime revenue of the original Red Orchestra that has been selling for over 5 years. The pre-sales and launch week sales of the game broke all company records, even beating out our hit game Killing Floor by a three-fold margin. But for all of this success we’ve not done as well as we would have liked in the most important area to us – the happiness of all of our customers. To put it bluntly, the game had a rough launch. We’ve been working diligently since launch to get these issues sorted and have made great progress fixing issues with matchmaking, VOIP, and stability as well as improving performance. The final major area that we’ve been working on is stats, player progression and ranking.

We have now fixed all of the major issues with the stats system and released an update yesterday to address these issues. Due to the problems with stats and players either earning stats and achievements that they didn’t actually earn or earning stats at many times the intended rate, we are going to have to do a global reset of all stats for the game. This means all achievements, stats and player progression will be rolled back as if all players were new. This was not an easy decision for us to make, but one we felt we needed to do to preserve the integrity of the stats and ranking system, and to provide all of the players the best experience with the game over the long term. Knowing that there are people that have been playing the game for a few weeks now and will lose the stats for that time we are going to provide a special bonus to all players. For the next few weeks all players will earn double experience in Red Orchestra 2. This means if a player plays the game during the double experience period they will quickly get their experience up to where they would have been had these issues never existed. Additionally, we are going to give those playing the game during the double experience period a special achievement called “In B4 Reset”. Right now this is just an achievement, but we’re going to be looking at ways to give special rewards to the players that have this achievement in the future.

Thank you to all of the players that have made Red Orchestra 2 a hit so far. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in store with free content coming for the game so stay tuned over the coming weeks for more news on that front!

Discuss on the forums ->

For those of you who haven’t seen the announcements, PC Gamer in the US are now producing PC Gamer Digital, available through Steam. This is their new take on delivering content to us all – makes a very interesting change. And Episode 1 features an interview with John Gibson on the topic of RO2… so go and take a look!

Discuss on the forums ->