Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad has had broken experience and achievements since it launched, among a number of other problems. In a message to customers today, Tripwire admits, "...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."

Because players were wrongly credited for Audie Murphy-levels of heroism, Tripwire has decided to globally reset the stats for the game.

As I say farewell to my hundreds of undeserved kills and phantom sniper shots, Tripwire explains its position. "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."

Since this is going to erase a lot of progress, Tripwire have made the next few weeks a "double experience period" so players can quickly rank up to the levels they would have achieved if the experience system had not been broken. Tripwire has also created an achievement, "In B4 Reset" for those who play during this period, and hope to give some future rewards to people with this achievement.

It's not all bad news, however. Red Orchestra 2 is hands-down the biggest success Tripwire has ever had: "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."

Listen up soldiers! We've got ten copies of Tripwire's Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad to give away, da? Ten of our European readers will be chosen by our glorious leaders to defend mother Russia against the Nazi threat.

Are you up to it comrade? Then find out how to enter inside.

Red Orchestra 2 is Tripwire's gritty, realistic World War 2 eastern front shooter. If you like your games hardcore and tense, this is the shooter for you. Not convinced? Read our Red Orchesta 2 preview.

Here's how you can win:

We want you to pitch us a war-game. It can be any genre, and play however you like, but it has to be based on a real life conflict. The more arty and unusual the better!

Answer in the comments below, the ten most original, interesting, historically obscure and funny ideas will win a copy of Red Orchestra 2.

European entrants only I'm afraid. The competition ends on September 30th. If you win you will be notified by private message and your name will appear in this week’s winners. Good luck comrade!

Red Orchestra 2 has launched. And to celebrate the five-year trek of development, Tripwire Interactive has released a trailer. Click within to have a look, and for information on our trio of new RO2 servers.



I've set up three RO2 servers for our community here in the US. Look forward to a heap of Steam events in the future--I think we're actually going to assemble something that resembles a clan, too. I can't make any promises that our servers will be running tonight--I'm unsure how long it'll take to update them and configure everything. I'll send up a flare over Twitter once they're up and running. In the meantime, here're the IPs:

San Jose, CA | 8.17.251.160:7757
Dallas, TX | 207.210.252.106:7757
Chicago, IL| 75.102.38.106:7757

I'm looking for folks to help me admin our servers and/or manage our RO2 clan. Responsibilities would include helping us run public and private events, manage clan members, and edit server settings and map rotation for maximum fun. If so, tell me why you'd be a good fit at evan@pcgamer.com.

Sad news: Tripwire Interactive announce that Red Orchestra 2 has been delayed. Happy news: it's just for two weeks. The team say they need a bit of extra QA time to iron out a few bugs and make sure Red Orchestra 2 is as polished as possible when it comes out. September 13 is the new release date.

"We haven’t taken this decision lightly, say Tripwire. "Moving a release date late in the day is a nightmare. We’ve done it because we feel it will make a difference to the product on launch day – for the better, obviously."

Find out more about the promising World War 2 military shooter in our Red Orchestra 2 preview, or check out the official Red Orchestra 2 site.