Recent patches to Overwatch have seen balancing changes to Roadhog’s hook among other things, making the hook a bit easier to escape and a bit harder to aim. Yet it seems that even with all the balancing, the hook still manages to cause players problems.

Right now as of patch 1.7, Roadhog needs to have players in his line of sight to hook them, and once said player breaks line of sight the hook should come detached. At least that’s the idea and for the most part it works out well. Yet it’s been discovered (and documented in gfycats by Reddit user tehGraboiDs) that if a hero with a dash or command jump move is hooked and then uses afore-mentioned move to move out of line of sight the hook stays connected and the captured hero is still pulled up in front of Roadhog.

Research into this by players seems to suggest that it only occurs if the captured hero dashes or jumps across open space though, as the hook will still break off if the hero gets behind an obstacle. This suggests that it’s a glitch where the hook’s code is still reading the captured hero as being ‘in line of sight’ as they’re in open space and thus it’s keeping the hook active. At least, this is what seems to be happening right now and is a pretty good guess.

Expect the next patch to bring more alterations to Roadhog’s hook then. At least for once this is a glitch that you probably won’t get banned for, but still – don’t be silly and abuse it okay? Don’t want to see anyone getting in trouble.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘smurfing’ refers to the act of using a low level character or account that is below that of your main accounts, to ensure that your opponents are of a level of skill significantly below your own. There’s some debate on whether people using accounts that are only a bit lower also counts, but the generally accepted definition means that it’s not a well-accepted practice among the main competitive gaming communities that exist. It strikes as very unsporting behaviour.

So no big surprise that an Overwatch pro player has come under fire for streaming himself not only doing it, but laughing about it while he was doing it, as well as commenting on their ineptitude compared to him. He even typed ‘I fak you’ into the chat to rub it in for his poor overwhelmed opponents.

The account used the alias IDDQ6, alleged to be a Swedish player known as IDDQD, and thus many outraged viewers have taken to the Overwatch forum to demand some sort of karmic payback for this show of sheer douchebagginess. The stream also went up on Youtube, and a number of the comments follow a similar line – making it very clear that the community does not think that the smurfing was in any way funny or entertaining.

Among suggestions for punishment, there has been a call from a few for ‘IDDQD’ to be permanently banned on all his accounts, with one of the top comments simply saying “Blizzard, wake up, he’s smurf streaming and you’re not banning him”

While I’m not sure a permaban is the right punishment, it’s up to Blizzard if they want to drop any sort of hammer to discourage this sort of gameplay for the future.

A study from 2012 that suggested that violent video games, especially those involving a lot of gunplay, could improve a player’s marksmanship skills and even led to them being more likely to then use guns in real life has been retracted by its publisher Communications Research. The posted notice on this retraction states that a committee at Ohio University recommended the retraction of the study after they were “alerted to irregularities in some variables of the data”.

Published 4-5 years ago, the study ‘Boom Headshot’ written by Brad Bushman makes the claims that people who regularly play shooting games extensively become better at gun shooting in real life, as well as more prone to violent acts. The implications of this are pretty obvious, it’s only what a lot of mainstream media outlets have trotted out over the years – video games are the cause of several big shootings and should be banned. However, Dr. Patrick Markey contributed the other side of the argument to the same study, disputing the video games make murderers of gamers and was part of the reason why the study came under investigation in the first place, along with fellow researched Malte Elson.

Speaking on its retraction Bushman is quoted as saying “A Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State University recommended retracting this article after being alerted to irregularities in some variables of the data set by Drs. Markey and Elson in January 2015. Unfortunately, the values of the questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable. In 2016, Drs. Markey and Elson sent their report to Dr. Gibbs, one of the editors of Communication Research, who decided that a retraction was warranted. A replication of the study by Dr. Bushman is in review” but also called the move to retract the study as a ‘smear campaign’.

If you want to read more on this, check out the page on the retraction over on the Retraction Watch website.