That’s right.  The patch that I’ve been so vague about for Marvel VS Capcom 2 will be releasing this Friday for both PSN and XBLA.  I purposefully haven’t been saying much about it because I wanted to have the content nailed down and the prop date set before letting you guys know about it.  Hit the jump for the details.

Before I get into the details, I wanted to give a big thanks to you guys the community.  MvC2 is a HUGE game with thousands of possible things that can go wrong given all of the characters.  You’ve really stepped in helped us with all of the bug reporting that you’ve given us, especially in the Unity forums and on SRK.  A super special shot out goes to Magnetro who came in the office for a week to help with the game.  When it comes to esoteric knowledge of the game, it doesn’t get any better than him.  Also, I want to acknowledge Preppy, who worked with Magnetro (online) while he was here in the office and just for being an awesome guy in the community who has taken a lot of initiative to help Capcom and other Marvel players.

One more note before I let you know what we were able to fix with the patch.  First is that the patch addresses bug fixes only.  We were not able to add new features.  Any function that’s not in the game now is considered a new feature.  There are technical restrictions on what can be fixed via a patch and new features are usually not viable, especially with ports.  To go along with that last statement, I’d like to stress that we’re aware of all the reported issues, but because of these technical limitations, we’re not able to address all of them.  I hope that with this patch, we’re able to at least address the major ones.

Now on to the fixes:

For both platforms:

   – Cable’s Hyper Viper Beam has been fixed so that it is blockable if you block during the flash.  There were many reports that other moves had the same issue but they seemed to be incorrect.  Note, this was a bug fix and not a design change.

   – Magneto’s Tempest was dealing incorrect amounts of chip damage.  Each hit of the Tempest is supposed to randomly deal 1 point or 0 points of chip damage.  Right now they either all deal 1 point of damage or they deal 0.  Random has been reintroduced.

   – Jin’s lp, mp, Cyclone Hyper was not combo’ing correctly.  This has been fixed so that it combos correctly.

PS3 specific fixes:

   – The title will no longer crash most of the time when using the “Search for Match” function.

   – Overall online stability has been improved, particularly when using headsets.

360 specific fixes:

   – Occasionally, a users record will freeze or contain grossly erroneous ratings.  This has been fixed and if you have this problem with your stats, they will automatically fix themselves the next time you play a ranked match.  For example, if you have a frozen record, the next time you play after the patch rolls, your wins/losses/ratings should fix to what they actually are.   ***PLEASE NOTE***  I will be resetting the leaderboards (every stat) on Friday November 6th (my birthday thank you very much).  This was the consensus from Unity members when asked if they wanted the boards nuked or not.

   – The game will no longer crash if 2 users enter a lobby at the exact same time.

Those are all the fixes.  It took a while to get these together (especially the network ones) because a lot of them didn’t show up in test.  Also, we spent a decent amount of time trying to fix other issues that turned out to not be technically able to be fixed via a patch.

I hope that the fixes above will greatly improve your experience with playing the game.  I apologize if there’s a fix or change that you wanted and it didn’t make it into the patch, but we took a look at every reported issue and some were are just not able to be added or fixed in a patch (0 input lag online setting for example) because of technical limitations to what patches are able to fix.  

Thanks again for all your support.