Halo: The Master Chief Collection has launched to pretty serious problems with online matchmaking, and a patch scheduled for today should mitigate them, yet 343 Industries isn't hiding behind a finger, and Halo franchise development director Frank O'Connor was definitely honest in commenting about the hoopla on NeoGAF, also explaining what happened.

Can't blame him for being steamed. We goofed, to put it politely. Many of the little issues are connected to a single, bigger big issue that didn't expose itself till we were in the wild and cascade from that.

Fingers crossed.

O'Connor also mentioned that there is still a lot left to do after today's patch:

There is lots more to do. No sleep till turkey day.

He then explained that the problem with parties not being placed in the same team has been addressed and will be monitored further:

Party splitting has been addressed in matchmaking and is something we're keeping a close eye on.

Finally, we hear that the Halo: CE playlist will be introduced as soon as the developers are confident that everything is stable:

Once we're confident all the rest is stable.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection definitely isn't the only case of problems with online connectivity in recent history. Driveclub and The Last Of Us: Remastered made the news for the same reason, and in all cases it proved to be a problem linked to the code, and not just a matter of traffic. It seems that traffic just proved to be the trigger to unveil issues that couldn't be discovered in a limited test environment.

We'll have to wait and see if this kind of problems will be avoided as we progress in the generation, but in the meanwhile it's nice to see developers owning to their mistakes and making amends.