Test Drive Unlimited has steadily made a climb up the Xbox Live Most Played chart, with its enthralling blend of satisfying racing action and genuinely creative design when it comes to online play. Like many 360 titles, the online experience is constantly being monitored by the team for improvements and enhancements, details of which Atari today sent along.

Working together with Microsoft, Atari and Eden Studios are currently hard at work on an update for the game due for release before the end of the week, which promises to fix various issues discovered after launch such as increasing the server capacity to improve general performance, reduce the Clubs issues and connection troubles.

The main issues addressed by the update include:

Problem of progression being lost

The problem occurs when you sell a house which contains a car that you're trying to sell on the E-trade, which creates an issue and the player's progression is lost. In order to resolve this, the E-trade system has been temporarily deactivated. You cannot currently trade vehicles with other players, although you can still sell your vehicles via the direct selling option. The problem is being dealt with as a priority and we will let you know as soon as the E-trade system is operational again.

Issues with CLUBS

During recent peak hours the demand on the servers reached unforeseen levels, resulting in some invitations for clubs being lost and players being unable to resend them. We are working on increasing the server limit, as well as fixing this issue with an update. The fix will check for lost invites and allow you to re-invite a player if the invitation was permanently lost.

Connections issues (message " TDU servers unavailable ")

Players may have noticed some "TDU server unavailable" messages during peak periods. This is partly due to the number of simultaneous players growing very quickly in a short time. We are currently tweaking our server to improve the performances, so connection issues will be greatly reduced. The extension of the server's capacity will also help to solve these issues.

Difficulty to find Friends

This is partly due to the server becoming saturated during peak hours. It will much easier to find your friends when the server capacity is increased.

Currently filters work only on the map - they are not properly implemented while driving. This will be fixed in the forthcoming patch and players will then be able to see only their friends in the game if they wish.

There follows some additional guidelines to make playing with friends easier:

How to play with your friends:

1- The first player goes into a less densely populated area as shown on the map, then zooms in to the island. Other people that want to join him then select him from the map. Players will join a session that's not full in this area, so the chances are high that this will be the first player's session.

2- As an alternative, the MS game invite is a very powerful tool, and can be used from a multiplayer lobby as follows:

- create a multiplayer private session - send an invite to your friends - race as you want in the created session - if you get bored of the race you're in, you can change for another one and bring the whole party with you (option available once race is over, before restarting another one)

3- Another way to play with friends is to create a Club, meet at the Club and start play from there.

We'll have more on the update soon.