The second of Battlefield Hardline’s betas is due to start next week, Tuesday February 3rd, and will last through until Sunday February 8th. This was confirmed in an EA press release and access will be through the Origin client.

This next beta will contain the new game mode Hotwire, which sees each team taking control of marked cars and then take down the other team’s cars. High-speed chase destruction is the name of the game and it’s playable on two maps in the beta, Downtown and Dust Bowl.

The other mode is Heist and that’s playable on the Bank Job map. One team are the Criminals and are trying to break into a vault and steal money, while the other team plays the Police who have to stop them. Simple.

There’s also going to be fully unlocked multiplayer progression available, letting you upgrade as high as you can provided you have the time to put into play.

Battlefield Hardline will release in North America on March 17th and 3 days later in the UK.

After allegations that he cheated in a Hearthstone tournament match earlier, Raphael ‘Hosty’ Tsantili has been released from his team, Archon.

The team’s official account tweeted out the news with a tweet that read:

“Archon has decided to release Hosty from the team. We in no way condone anything that would compromise the integrity of the game.”

However, the creator of the team also tweeted out on his own personal account that he didn’t think Hosty had cheated in the game and was a great guy, saying that the release of the player was not solely down to the match and the allegations of cheating made.

As for what Hosty is supposed to have done, the match was streamed out for viewers to watch. The allegation against Hosty alleges that he had the tournament stream open on his second monitor, with people saying that the reflection of this could be seen in a picture behind him. Of course, the stream was on a 10 minute delay so any information about what cards his opponent had would have been out of date, but still potentially useful to know.

The Twitch chat was where the allegations were first made, and a Reddit post was shortly made carrying the news to Redditors everywhere. The mods took it down on the rule of ‘no witch hunting’ but has since put it back up in light of the dismissal. Hosty himself has been to offer the defence that he did have the channel on his second monitor but he had it stopped at the time of play.

Right now, we don’t know 100% if there was cheating going on. What it does say is that rules need to be made in how best to conduct Hearthstone tournaments to minimise cheating and the possible accusations of cheating. Hopefully a bigger group can find some good guidelines and begin to set an example to be followed.

After all, no one likes to see a competition derailed with accusations.

It has been confirmed that a competitive Counter Strike: Global Offensive match played last year was a fixed match, with the list of people involved containing some pro-players and thousands of dollars in wagered money. Now Valve have taken action and placed bans on seven of the involved, stopping them from competing in events they have sponsored.

The match itself saw the favourites to win, team iBUYPOWER (what a strangely ironic name) lose their match against their opponents. However even at the time a few eyebrows were raised in some people, who thought that the team’s performance and demeanor suggested something was going on. Word began to slip out that the match had been rigged and eventually an eSports journalist with The Daily Dot began to dig a little deeper. What he found was that the rabbit hole indeed went very deep.

The game was rigged in order to allow for big payouts on bets made on CS:GO Lounge, a site that allows for wagers and item-trading. The site themselves had suspicions when they saw the betting patterns and traced back a number of them to a well-connected member of the pro CS:GO scene – Duc “cud” Pham.

Implicated in this were the former iBUYPOWER roster, one of North America’s top squads, as well as some other members of the CS:GO community outside the team who had advanced notice of the result and were able to make out like kings from their payout of the bets. Valve have now banned the following 7 players from events they sponsor in future:

• Duc “cud” Pham
• Derek “dboorn” Boorn
• Casey Foster
• Sam “Dazed” Marine
• Braxton “swag” Pierce
• Keven “AZK” Larivière
• Joshua “Steel” Nissan

Valve has also come out and said that as far as gambling in eSports go, no professional players, their managers or team staff should be betting on results or giving away information that could in any way influence bets.

The pre-release for Minecraft’s 1.8.2 was released in December, just before the Mojang people went off to enjoy their holidays. When they came back they were back to work on it, and have released a few updates to fix bugs that were cropping up.

Today saw the release of the fifth which among other things fixed a few issues with beacons, especially to do with beacons inside the Nether. Most other bugs were to do with wrong data being stored or crashes, but interestingly there’s two to do with Mooshrooms and incorrectly displayed textures/models. One being the model of the mushrooms they have on their backs, the other… their udder texture. How strange.

If you want to grab it, wait a little bit. Some code was slightly broken with this update and Mojang are going to release a patch soon to mend it. Once they have mended it though, I recommend creating a separate profile to try out pre-release and ‘beta’ versions of the game. After all, these are unfinished versions and believe me, incompatibility between game version and saves can get a little nasty and could end with the loss of the save file.

Full bug fix list below:

• Items placed into a beacon are lost upon destroying it or reloading a world
• Beacons work inconsistently in the Nether
• Keyboard input causes mouse look to stutter or jerk (Fixed in LWJGL 2.9.3)
• Tellraw crashes if clickEvent is an URL without “http://”
• Mooshroom udder texture does not display correctly
• Mooshrooms incorrectly display custom mushroom models
• Beacons in Nether need clear path to “sky”
• Beacon stops working at a certain height
• Can’t select any of the previous created worlds in Java 8 (Fixed by installing Java 7) (Windows 8)
• Able to hit a block behind out of range entity.
• villages.dat stores player names instead of UUIDs
• Preexisting vines on east and west sides of blocks are rendered at the wrong face of the block (floating)
• Glass Pane image flipped
• Huge Mushrooms Generate Incorrectly
• Hopper: java.lang.NullPointerException: Updating screen events
• Various particles near world border rendered incorrectly.
• Hoppers grab items from minecarts, that aren’t standing directly above them
• Changing owner of Enderpearl doesn’t work.

Here at Sanitarium.FM Towers, many of us have long believed that the reign of Flash was over and that use of Flash applets on the internet would soon die out. Youtube’s latest announcement may have just guaranteed this eventuality by hitting it where it hurts, as Google announce it is dropping it as a standard video delivery format for Youtube in favour of HTML5.

HTML5 has long been heralded as the natural successor to Flash, as its presence as a standard all modern internet browsers strive to follow removes the need for external plugins; making it both more efficient and better supported across all of today’s most relevant platforms – especially smartphones, some of which do not come with Flash support at all, but which DO have HTML5-capable browsers. HTML5 will also become the default delivery method for videos streamed using Safari 8, Internet Explorer 11, Chrome and the latest versions of Firefox.

However, just being capable of showing video out-of-the-box and on more devices, with less requirements than Flash doesn’t seem to have been the only reason for the move. On the YouTube blog, YouTube Engineering Manager Richard Leider said that HTML5’s adoption of adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology, which allows YouTube to dynamically alter video quality to suit the bandwidth available, was the real nail in the coffin for Flash support; as previously this was a capability of Flash alone. With HTML5 now able to adjust quality on the fly, videos should load quicker; and users should find themselves staring at a “buffering” icon much less often than before.

Moving to HTML5 will also allow YouTube to use the VP9 codec, which will allow 4K HD quality video running at 60FPS on capable hardware. Combined with WebRTV support for easy sharing of videos and video broadcasts, Flash’s days may well finally be numbered. And that’s a win-win for everyone – except the technology’s owners, Adobe, who no doubt are having an urgent meeting as we speak.