Gaming
Blizzard Creates a Toxicity Strike Team
Heroes of the storm and Overwatch have long been plagued with toxic players within their communities. From throwers to one-trick to that one guy who claims he’s gonna carry and just ends up scream and insulting everyone else and just being a useless dick, we’ve all encountered issues with toxic players.
Numerous are the times we’ve begged game director Jeff Kaplan for stricter punishments and actual consequences for toxic players. Well now is the time to rejoice my brothers in arms for blizzard has answered our prayers.
Despite several key reporting features like detailed report categories and reports on consoles taking an impressive amount of time to be implemented, Jeff Kaplan recently told Kotaku that turning the tide in the fight against toxicity is just as important as adding new characters and levels to the popular team shooter.
“We’re not sitting here with our heads in the sand,” said Kaplan. “You have concerns, and your concerns are now one of our top priorities. If that means the thing we’re gonna focus on as much as Moira and Blizzard World is toxicity, then we’re gonna do it.”
Blizzard has looked at learning machines as well as forming a “strike team” composed of game designers, support staff, analytics people, and a special group called “Risk” in order to fight cheating and hacking. While the team currently has plans for the overwatch community, ranging from short to long range, no specifics have been given as to not alert hackers and griefers.
“We’re starting to act less toward silences and more toward suspensions,” Kaplan said. “If somebody’s doing bad behavior, just silencing them can sometimes convince them to do things like throw matches and grief in other ways. If you keep exemplifying bad behavior, we’re gonna have you leave the game [permanently].”
To go along with the new changes, so too comes a new notification system. Currently, if someone you have reported has had actions taken against them you would have been sent an email instead of in-game. The goal, Kaplan explained, is to make it clear that reporting does something and, to the reported, that their actions have tangible consequences.
One of a toxic player’s most devastating tricks is leaving in the middle of a competitive match, this, however, has multiple solutions of varying degrees of difficulty. Player’s could backfill into comp matches while losing has a higher chance players in these games could receive a smaller loss of SR compared to a player in a normal match, this backfill could come from either a searching player or a friend of someone in the match who was either invited or watching.
Another solution would be to add a high skill AI to replace that missing player and again offer a smaller loss of SR. Solutions like these not only provide the victims with some cushioning but also helps removes a card from a toxic players deck.
Hopefully, the new strike team and the learning machines will provide us with a cleaner gaming experience
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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