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Fans of HiRez Studio’s 3rd person action MOBA SMITE will know that the developer loves to runs sales, in game events and generally just throw things at players. This is partly due to the fact that they want you to spend money on skins. But, when the skins are as generally high quality as the ones HiRez turns out, you can’t really blame them. With the holidays here, HiRez is ratcheting up the in-game goodies even more. From Saturday Dec 17th at 5 a.m. EST until Tuesday, December 20th at 5 a.m. EST players can earn triple worshippers, experience and favor in SMITE. This makes the weekend the perfect time to work on your mastery levels with Nike and that pesky Fafnir.
And if that wasn’t enough for you, once Triple Everything Weekend ends on the 20th, the 7 Days of Saturnalia Event will begin. Similar to Triple Everything Weekend, thjis second event will offer Double Everything as well as free gems for completing quests themed around the in game pantheons. From HiRez themselves:
Beginning Tuesday, December 20th until Monday, December 26th, join in the 7 Days of Saturnalia once again! Indulge in free Gems, Pantheon Chest Sales, and double Experience/Worshipers all week long.
Each day, there will be a new Pantheon specific Quest players can participate in that will yield 25 Gems upon completion. That means you can earn up to 175 Gems during Saturnalia! Each Pantheon Quest and Pantheon Chest will be available for 2 days.
Kudos to HiRez for giving players a full ten days of Christmas gifts, especially those who might still be trying to earn some gems and finish off those Odyssey purchases in order to get that sick Anubis Tier 5 skin. Go log in and own some people on the Battleground of the Gods people, HiRez is literally throwing gems at you to do so!
It’s probably happened to all of us. We tune in to a stream on Twitch wanting to just relax and watch some good gameplay, a major tournament or even some cooking. And then, invariably our eyes stray to the chat. Yes, Twitch chat. That hotbed of thoughtful, fair and equitable destruction.
Or, as Totalbiscuit once described it: eye cancer.
While I won’t characterize ALL Twitch chats as wretched cesspools filled with some of the worst vitriol I have ever seen spew from a human’s mouth, many of them are. Just watch any major eSports tournament, such as DOTA2’s International or the Smite World Championships. Racism, sexism, hate speech. It’s all there. And it would seem Twitch wants to do something about it, because they have just announced a new feature called “AutoMod”.
Streamers can toggle AutoMod in their settings page. If the service works as advertised it will allow streamers to set up filters for both terrible words and the little “l33t” speak version speople use to get around them.
According to Twitch:
AutoMod is a unique moderation tool that does more than filter inappropriate chat. When a user sends a message that AutoMod flags as potentially inappropriate, the message is held in a publishing queue awaiting moderator approval. AutoMod also enables broadcasters to adjust the degree of filtering in the event they are more or less conservative about the type of dialogue they want to see in their chat. Beyond identifying inappropriate words and phrases, AutoMod can detect potentially inappropriate strings of emotes and other characters or symbols that others could use to evade filtering.
This is a potentially big deal, as a large portion of the Twitch viewing audience probably aren’t terrible people. But they get drowned out by the vocal minority that thrive on spewing hate. My prime concern though is this: Aside from when I’m actually the one streaming or acting as a moderator, I habitually hide Twitch chat for the simple reason that I don’t want to look at it. I imagine I’m not alone in this. And I’m not sure that this tool, even if it works 100% as advertised will be enough to change that for many people.
What do you think? Will this tool get you to look at Twitch chat again? Or do you think people will find a way to circumvent it in short order?
The Elder Scrolls Online is due to get an update similar to Skyrim’s Hearthfire, in that players will soon be able to purchase and fill with items to make their very own dwellings. The update was originally mentioned at E3 this year back in June, and now a rough ETA has been put on it – Feb 2017.
Named Homestead, the update will be free and introduces 40 different homes across the map; all within base zones on launch, none within DLC-only areas. There will be over 2000 items to buy or craft as well for your chosen home, and the dwellings will be styled after the game’s ten playable races. There will be a variety of sizes too from small living spaces such as Inn rooms to huge manors with large outside areas included, and homes will be instanced to save players all rushing for the best plots of land when the feature launch. Fast travel to homes and the ability to invite friends and guild mates will also be available, and all homes are secure from other players who would try and steal furniture and other features from your home.
Bethesda wrote about Homestead: “Unfurnished homes will be available for purchase with either in-game Gold or with Crowns in the Crown Store. Fully furnished homes will be available for purchase through the Crown Store with Crowns. Players will be allowed to preview homes prior to purchase, whether furnished and unfurnished.”
For further information, visit the game’s official site.
About a week after dataminers found and revealed a bunch of details about what to expect from Overwatch’s winter event, Blizzard have officially revealed the date of when it’ll start – December the 13th had had previously been guessed.
Dataminers had already revealed a lot of detail about what was coming, although it was all pretty vague. For example we knew that a new gamemode would be coming, but not what it’d be; as well as which characters would get new skins but not what they’d look like. It did reveal some interesting details though, including that Torbjorn was the only character who would be getting a skin, a highlight animation and an emote through the special loot boxes – so was probably quite important for this update.
Ever since the game was revealed, there were rumblings about how well Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was going to do. Even packaging it with a remastered copy of Modern Warfare, which originally picked interest way up, turned out to be a bust when it was discovered that the disc copies wouldn’t play the remastered game without the Infinite Warfare disc – stopping gamers from buying the bundle for just the remaster.
Release brought more ridiculousness, with Microsoft refunding one PC player because he was one of only TWO players online looking for a match (because cross-platform play hadn’t been allowed by Activision). Now stats are coming out showing that the game’s sales are down around 50% compared to last year’s Black Ops 3 sales. Ouch.
The information comes via NPD sell-through data sourced by two Wall Street analysts. Share sin Activision Blizzard have recently dropped around 20% since it peaked in mid-October this year, and COD sale worries that were around even before its release are likely to be a part of that. The figures are very close to the physical Gfk Chart that was released in November showing that first week sales were down 48%. At the time people pointed out that it didn’t include digital sales, which count for a lot of sales nowadays and also that the news about the second game not working without the disc could have had an effect on sales too – however now it seems that the figures were very accurate.
“Infinite Warfare units came in 17% shy of our expectations, down close to 50% year-on-year,” Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote. Elsewhere, another Wall Street source told CNBC that sales were actually down 51% year-on-year.
