Seems Watch_Dogs was a big success for Ubisoft. They’re currently doing quite well financially according to their earning report of the first half of their financial year. They’ve made €484 million in sales and Watch_Dogs’s 9 million copies sold since launch as a very big hand in that.

Back in May Ubisoft revealed that it’d already broken records for first day sales in Europe and this has helped the report to show a ‘higher-than-expected’ performance. Digital revenue also leapt up 90% more from the previous year, and that brought in €134.7 million worth of sales for them.

They’re not estimating that they’ll get to close the year with “sales of at least €1,400 million.” This is largely down to the release of a few big titles, Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity among them as well as there still being the big selling time of Christmas to look forward to.

An investor call that came with the press release reveals that the hoped for sales figures for the Crew is 2 million copies and Far Cry 4, 6 million

Seems that Blizzard weren’t done with dealing with cheaters in Hearthstone when they banned a large number of accounts suspected of using auto-play bots earlier this week. Now they’re aiming to tackle another form of cheating or rather an exploit of the system: Win Trading.

To explain, win trading is when players have agreements to purposely forfeit matches to artificially push up player ranks in the ranked play ladder. This is done most often at the higher ranks when there are fewer players in that rank bracket and therefore the chances of facing the same opponent are higher. In other words, it’s an exploit of the system and Blizzard aren’t going to stand for it.

“Fair play is at the heart of Hearthstone,” Blizzard community manager Wirthun writes. “The Ranked Play ladder is a place where players have the opportunity to duel and gauge their card-slinging prowess while climbing the ranks. Participating in Ranked Play should be fun, exciting, competitive, and fair.”

The exploit had already been brought to light some ten months ago in a Reddit thread by high ranked player Specialist, and another player zRusher also has admitted to using win trading to climb to legendary status. They claim to have been exploit testing though and say that they were left with a bad taste in their mouth after using the method.

Blizzard are now handing down permanent bans and disqualification from tournaments for all players caught engaging in this behaviour. Specialist has already confirmed his account has been banned.

Reddit thread “Major flaw in the Ladder system”: [x]

So yeah…  I’m doing this…

Help me to change the face of men’s health this #Movember by making a donation to my moustache: http://mobro.co/lonesamurai

Details of Far Cry’s PvP system have been revealed today. It will see two distinctly different factions to play as with different attack methods.

Pagan Min’s magical Rakshasha are able to ride elephants, summon spirits, blink around the battlefield and shoot arrows. The other side are the Golden Path faction who made use of modern weaponry such as guns, rocket launchers and armoured vehicles. So this is a literal magic vs science fight.

The PvP can take place across ten different maps and in three modes – Outpost, Propaganda and Demon Mask. Outpost is a simple defend the outpost game with the Golden Path playing defenders and the Rakshasha assaulting, while Propaganda is the same but with the Golden Path attacking and the Rakshasha holding down the propaganda-spreading fort. Demon Mask is a capture the flag game type.

If you were waiting for Sony to announce a release date for the PS Plus edition of Drvieclub, or even for them to give a rough estimate of when you could expect it… well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.

Today on a post for the Driveclub Facebook page the boss of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida apologised for the delay to the game, released by Evolution Studios and a Playstation 4 exclusive. The PS Plus version was to be free to subscribers of the service and was expected to have released alongside the full game last month. Unfortunately it suffered from issues that stopped players from getting online so it was held back as Sony tried to get it to work. Now, it seems that they’ve made the decision to postpone the release until further notice.

The full message is below:

Hi everyone,

 

I wanted to provide you with the latest update on DRIVECLUB. Unfortunately, the road to launch has been a little rocky, and we are truly sorry that so many of you have not been able to enjoy everything that we had hoped DRIVECLUB would deliver.

 

We have been listening to your feedback and realize that patience understandably is running out. Evo is working around the clock to close the gap, and we have deployed additional engineering resources to help resolve the remaining issues as soon as possible.

 

Unfortunately, the time frames required to roll out the fully connected experience will be longer than anticipated and we do not have an exact time frame for when they will be resolved. We will continue to update you on progress and you can find the latest info on the DRIVECLUB Facebook page.

 

We are also very conscious that we have disappointed so many of you who were looking forward to playing the promised PS Plus Edition. Our first priority is to provide you with the best possible experience while playing DRIVECLUB. With the high volume of new players and additional server load the PS Plus Edition is anticipated to bring, we are currently not confident that we can guarantee the best online experience. Until we can ensure that everyone can enjoy the full social connected online experience, we will be postponing the release of the PS Plus Edition until further notice.

 

On behalf of WWS we are enormously grateful for your patience and we thank you for the continued support and encouragement. Again, we sincerely apologize for the delay. We are committed to giving you the best racing experience on PS4 – it’s taking a little longer than we hoped.

 

Thanks,
Shu