Recently Blizzard have brought down the banhammer on a number of World of Warcraft accounts who were found to have been using third-party bot programs to play parts of the game for them.

The Community Manager Lore was the one who revealed the bans on the forums saying “We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as ‘bots.’ As a part of this action, we have removed various currencies and inventory from these accounts including, but not limited to, gold, PvP currencies, and gear. The penalty for those identified as repeat offenders has also been increased.”

The accounts in question haven’t been permanently banned though, instead given six months time out in suspension. The reasons why Lore says is that research has revealed that it’s the better way to cut down on botting players.

Those with banned accounts apparently often go to buy a new account and most often continue where they left off, while those with suspended accounts are more likely to just wait out the suspension period and then when they do get their accounts back they may give up the botting out of fear of being caught again and permanently kicked next time. In other words the shock of being caught and almost losing what they worked on often acts as a better deterrent than actually permanently losing it all.

Interesting stuff.

Following on from the hints gotten from job listings that were posted last week, we’re beginning to get a sketchy picture of the type of game that Ken Levine’s hoping to make next, albeit a really bare bones picture.

Speaking on NPR’s On Point, Levine emphasized the importance of replayability in games and this new game is apparently an experiment in achieving that; one that he’s been working in some way since Bioshock Infinite was finished.

“We started this experiment after we finished BioShock Infinite, which was, ‘How do you make a narrative game feel like the kind of games we’ve made before but make it replayable and make it extend and make it react to the players?’ Make it replayable by giving players different ways to approach the problems and really letting them dictate the experience.”

He spoke about how he felt that because players no longer wanted to spend $60 on an experience that was only 10-12 hours long, he felt that the triple-A single-player narrative in games is vanishing. He’s using something that he called “narrative Legos” that he mentioned back at GDC 2014, where dialogue, relationships and other parts of a game can be used to form several non-linear narratives.

On the clue that we got form the job listing – that the game could be an open-world one – Levine says that it won’t be an open-world game in the way we might think of it traditionally.

“The thing we’re working on is sort of a small-scale open-world game,” he says. “And the reason ours is an open-world game is because if you want to give the player the agency to drive the experience, that really fights against the linear nature of the games we made before like BioShock and BioShock Infinite. What it really means though is, ‘How do you make your content so it feels like the quality of the content you’ve made in games before but reacts to the players’ agency and then allows the player to do something in one playthrough and something very different in another playthrough?’”

Of course, this is all experimentation right now. Levine isn’t ready to make any big concrete reveals about the game yet, so we can keep on guessing what we’ll be getting at some point in the future.

Welcome everyone to Galactic Outfitting Weekly! Each week we’ll be taking you through the newest and coolest stuff Frontier puts on the Elite Dangerous store. With the launch of Horizons and Christmas just around the corner, Frontier has tons of new items up on the store, so lets dive right in.

First up,bobble heads. Those who were in the early betas for Elite might remember the cute little bobble head that rode on your dashboard. If, like me, you were dismayed when they were removed in the full release, you can now do a little happy dance. Bobble heads can now be purchased and used to decorate that boring old ship dashboard. But who wants boring pilot obbleheads when you can have a Christmas tree! Or, a collection of letters numbers and symbols you can use to spell whatever you want right on your ship’s dash. You can place up to ten bobble heads on the dashboards of most ships, allowing plenty of creative freedom in placing them, as well as cluttering up your otherwise pristine flight deck. The Christmas tree will set you back a modest three pounds, while the mix and match letters, of which there are a total of 71 alphanumeric symbols comes in at a slightly heftier ten pounds. Still, that’s not to much to pay for the ability to spell hashtag bad lone on my ships dash on stream!

If you’re feeling particularly festive and the tree bobble just isn’t enough for you, don’t worry. Frontier has dropped three sets of festive paint packs on us. The Asp, Cobra, and Sidewinder all get a little love  with swirls, snowflakes and stars replacing the normal two toned paint schemes. Best of all, each paint pack contains six different variants, meaning there’s sure to be one that you love.  In testing them out, we found that adding additional decals  tends to mar the look of the paintjob, so you may want to remove all those onionhead stickers for these.

Lastly, the Cobra Mk IV gets sweet skins as it blasts into the HOrizons expansion pack. The pack contains three variants, approved by Faulcon De Lacey themselves and sporting a nice military digital camo pattern. The Cobra Mk IV has unique lines compared to the other version of the ship, so it’s fitting that it gets it’s own nifty paint jobs as well. As if the ship wasn’t awesome enough, right?

Thats it for this first installment of Galactic Outfitting Weekly, but don’t worry. We’ll be back as long as Frontier keeps making awesome stuff for Elite.

Frontier Developments is set to launch the Horizons expansion to their galaxy sand box space sim, Elite: Dangerous today. Horizons is the start of the “Season 2” content for the game and will initially bring with it planetary landings, the ability to explore planetary surfaces in SRV space buggies and some basic crafting. Further content is planned for Season 2 including the ability to crew a single ship with multiple players.

Frontier has also whipped up a nice trailer to go with the launch, which you can check out below.

Recently there seems to have been a lot of release date delays owing to the need for further polish. You know I’m all for it though if it results in a game that’s not full of game-breaking bugs, and so my reaction to hearing that Fable Legends is the latest to fall prey to schedule slippage my first thought is “Okay good.”

Fable Legends is going to take the franchise’s RPG format and attempt to fit it into a RTS hybrid for five players, where four of them compete against one by working together through the waves of monsters, and that one player overlords it over the other four and has tremendous fun being the bad guy. Obviously it’s a big idea and despite having originally been set to come out sometime this year, the Open Beta has now been pushed back to Spring of 2016 to let it mature.

Although the game is in Closed Beta and will soon be letting in another 100,000 players, the post on the official blog says that they aren’t ready to go to Open yet because there is an understanding that Open Beta means “mostly finished” and right now the team at Lionhead feel there is a still a lot more feature-wise to be added before they can consider the game to be at that stage.

Of course, Spring 2016 is also seeing the stage set for many other games, with Mirror’s Edge’s sequel, XCOM 2 and Far Cry all having release dates set in the same time period. Looks as if we’re in for a busy Spring 2016…