A new law in China has seen Blizzard having to reveal the drop rates of loot boxes and packs of cards in both Overwatch and Heathstone in the country. We got the loot box rates earlier, and now that the pack rates have been revealed it seems that guesses taken about the card drop rates from packs were actually pretty accurate.

Of course, the document that reveals the drop rates is in Chinese but a quick translate works out as reading something like every Hearthstone pack will contain at least one card of “rare” value or better (which is widely known about already); “epic” cards will appear on average around every one in five packs, while the sought-after “legendary” cards have a drop rate of about one in every twenty packs.

Players had already previously done their own research on the rates, with them estimating that the legendaries dropped every 18-20 packs of cards – so if the Chinese rates are true across the board they were pretty close. What else is interesting is that the existence of the ‘pity timer’ is talked about in the last line of the Chinese announcement which reads (roughly translated) “actual odds of getting better quality cards will increase in tandem as players open more packs.” For those unaware of what it is, the ‘pity timer’ is said to increase chances of legendaries appearing in your packs the longer you go without finding one.

While we can’t know if these are just for the China region or if these rates apply across the board, it does seem to correlate with previous player research as mentioned. Even if it’s slightly different elsewhere, it’s just interesting to read.

Outlast 2 released at the end of last month, a sequel to one of the horror hits of 2013 – a good year for Youtubers playing horror games. The second game took the series out of the asylum and into north Arizona and mostly got positive reviews. Of course, despite this there were some complaints about the difficulty and so developers Red Barrels have addressed this in a patch released yesterday.

One of the main complaints about the difficulty level had to do with the speed at which the batteries used in your camera were consumed. Much like the last game, Outlast 2 has a style of ‘found footage’ gameplay, and seeing through the camera especially while using the night-vision capabilities will use up battery life and once they run down you need to change out those batteries so you can see in the dark again. Battery conservation is one of the mechanics but a lot of players felt that Outlast 2’s camera just chewed through the batteries at a fair rate. The patch sees that the camera’s microphone will now no longer use extra batteries so you’ll be able to locate enemies through the walls now without having to be worried about using too much power.

On the game’s Steam community page the devs said that the patch “introduces some minor adjustments to the game’s difficulty in key areas and moments. On Normal difficulty this will offer players a more appropriately balanced experience while still maintaining higher levels of challenge on Hard and Nightmare difficulties.”

The full patch notes can be found here.

Well, Digmbot predicted that there might be reasons why there was no PC demo for Prey and already a fairly game-breaking bug has been discovered and abused in the game. It’s not one that most players will really mind though.

Prey has only just been released, and the glitch allows players to basically duplicate resources over and over giving them a virtually unlimited supply of crafting resources. The glitch makes use of the in-game material recyclers to reproduce the items placed within many times over.

To reach those recyclers, a player only has to progress around an hour into the game and upon reaching the main character Morgan Yu’s office you will gain access to the material recycler, or at least it will become useable. You then fill the recycler with already recycled items and by then dividing it into at least four piles of things, you can effectively copy everything.

It probably won’t be there for long though, so get in while the getting’s good. Or you know, just don’t cheat. But as someone who abused a similar glitch way back in the early Pokemon days, who I am to tell you not to use this one?

Overwatch making money, Civ VI value and Oculus re-focus – your news update!