While I still maintain that UFC 2009 Undisputed is one of the best sports games of the year, and in recent memory, I haven't touched the game in weeks, thanks in large part to the terrible lag in online play and the ever-present problem of people dropping out of ranked matches before they get beat. And though we've known for a while that THQ has been working on a patch to fix the problems, now we finally have the details of what this patch will entail.

Writing on the game's community forum, producer Neven Dravinski outlined the patch details:

1. We recognize premature match quitting as the biggest online issue and have taken steps to fix it. The Patch will have integrated code that detects who pulls the cable and will assign a Loss as well as a Did Not Finish to that player. The DNF is only counted for the player who executes the disconnection. The DNF rate will be displayed on the fighter selection screen of the Online Ranked Match. When disconnected the Winning Streak is also reset to 0.
2. We've adjusted Ranked Matches to match up players with better connections, which will improve lag issues we've seen to date.
3. We've adjusted the difficulty of performing submissions against AI opponents to improve the balance of subs vs. striking when playing against the AI.
4. We've adjusted the Flash KO rate so that they are less frequent.
5. We've increased maximum number of points awarded in online play from 99,999 to 999,999 and we've increased the Max Level from 100 to 200.
6. We've lowered the Winning Streak Bonus Max from 5 to 3.
7. We've removed the decimal places on the Leaderboard Winning Percentage so we only show whole percentages.
8. We've addressed the CAF cheat so the skill levels in CAF cannot be cheated and increased. Also any CAF with unfair point values will no longer be able to be used Online.
9. For PS3 users we've also fixed a bug that causes a freeze during auto-save; whichever controller was used to Press Start on the Title Screen will be identified as the main controller.

Rest assured our entire team plays A LOT of online matches and we read the boards every day, so we are well aware of the issues. We want to make sure we patch this correctly so it is taking a bit of time, but I can confidently say we'll be releasing this patch soon.

The premature quitting fix is the big one here but increasing submits against the AI, improving onlnie performance, decreasing flash KOs, and fixing the skill level cheating are all welcome improvements as well. Now, if they could just figure some way to get flash submits into the game…