"Our support of [Dawn of War] wasn't up to snuff. We did that to ourselves by making a very difficult patching pipeline, so one of the first things we did was make it very easy to patch [Dawn of War II]," lead designer Jonny Ebbert told Strategy Informer.

Ebbert explained that the "it took us months to create a patch and get it out to the player, which sucked because we couldn't react quickly enough to developments in the community, you know problems and things breaking the game, so our new patching pipeline allows us to respond very quickly which is huge."

Along with delayed patches, Relic was unhappy with the original's online play due to firewall and matchmaking problems, issues it hopes to resolve with the sequel by integrating Games For Windows LIVE. The studio also felt it could deliver a more polished product, something Ebbert believes it realized with the action-RTS sequel.

In addition to more frequent patches, Ebbert also revealed that the studio plans to deliver a steady stream of free downloadable content for legitimate buyers, inspired by Valve's numerous game-expanding updates to releases such as Team Fortress 2.

"Free downloadable, regularly accessible stuff that enhances the game and then that's an incentive for the people who didn't buy the game to buy it," he said. "So we've got a really bold, robust strategy for that and we're going to be revealing more details in about a month, but I think players are going to like it."

Ebbert added: "We want to give out steady doses of free downloadable content because we believe in rewarding people who buy the game and the reason we don't like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops...we're going with the approach that Valve pioneered to just reward the people who actually bought the game with cool stuff. "