Evolve was a good game. The asymmetrical 4 hunters vs 1 monster romp was good fun, provided you had a good team to play with. Shame really that it quickly died out as the player base expected just didn’t come to the game, partially down to Turtle Rock’s DLC program.

However a few days ago the game hit “Stage 2” of it’s ‘evolution’, going free-to-play. The result? A big upsurge in player numbers and seemingly some renewed interest in the game. Going from 157 before the re-launch to 32,000 in a 24-hour peak seems promising for the game.

The re-launch also came with an overhaul to the gameplay, and changes to both the balance and a microtransaction model to fund the game. A further patch is to come as well, as Turtle Rock attempt to maintain the player numbers this time.

Community co-ordinator Cory Lanier wrote in a Reddit thread “We’ve done a lot of gameplay related changes for Stage 2 and that is a big focus for us going forward.” We’ve got a lot of feedback on just general balance stuff that myself and the rest of the balance team are starting to work on for our first update that’ll be hitting next week.

“We’ve got a lot more work to do but it’s great to see so many people coming back and giving things a shot. Hopefully we can keep people around and happy.”

The roster of playable heroes within Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is due to grow by another two in the coming weeks according to the developer of the game.

Entering the Nexus now are Diablo III’s archangel of hope, Auriel, and World of Warcraft’s Gul’dan. We don’t have a specific date, but you can see the models now in Blizzard’s latest developer diary if you just can’t wait to see what they’ll look like. Each will come with palette swapped skins, as well as the Master skin you can gain once you’ve gotten well good with them in-game and proven it.

Also coming along with the two new characters are some new skins for existing heroes. King Arthas (from WoW), Johanna (from Diablo) and Li Ming (also Diablo) are going to get new skins as well.

In recent years, one of the larger ongoing issues on Youtube has been the disclosure of when a Youtuber is being paid to promote a product. Originally it was hard to determine whether a video was a ‘paid for’ one, purely because no laws existed to set out proper process – and some took advantage of this to not disclose videos they had been paid for. Fortunately new laws come into play a while back that made it much easier to define exactly what should be done. After all, for a Youtuber who’s next meal depends on their video output paid-for content is a good thing and as long as the viewers are aware of its nature then all is above board and no one is misled.

However, that’s not to say all the problems are gone for good and recent events couldn’t have shown that more clearly. a recent video from H3H3 Productions has shown that two prominent Youtubers – ProSyndicate and TmarTn – have been making videos to promote CSGO gambling through a website called CSGOLotto. A website that they both own. Needless to say once the word got out, the Internet was in uproar.

ProSyndicate has been tweeting out that he apologises if people felt misled by this, while TmarTn at first followed the same line but then took to deleting said tweets and privatising videos about CSGOLotto despite having previously protested innocence in this matter. His original Twitlonger response on the matter can still be seen here though thanks to webcache. TeamEnVyUs, who have a minority stakholder in TmarTn, have come out with a statement to make clear that they were not involved with the situation and nor were any of its players.

Earlier Valve seemed to be taking a stand against CSGOLotto by blocking access to it through their Steam client with a warning that the site was malicious, having been flagged under “phishing, scamming, spamming, or delivering malware.” This block was later reversed when it turned out that the flag was a mistake by a volunteer moderator after a number of people took to flagging the URL as such.

At the moment it remains to be seen what action, if any, will be taken against ProSyndicate and/or TmarTn. The situation is still ongoing as of time of writing, and we will of course update you if there are further developments. It’s just a sad reminder that the times of the grey area of disclosure really aren’t so far behind us yet.

Every year Summer Games Done Quick broadcasts speedruns of video games, all in the name of fundraising for charity – and with many different channels for different languages to boot.

Speedrun is the art of finishing a game as quickly as possible, and often makes use of glitches and bugs within a game to skip chunks of game which is why older games are commonly seen on speedrunning channels. For those games that aren’t exploitable like this, speedrunning is instead a challenge of perfect timing of a chain of actions with one miss resulting in a longer time taken.

This time the charity in question that they’re raising money for is Doctors Without Borders, something that we can agree is a worthy cause.

If you’re interested to see what’s on the menu this time, the schedule can be found here. If you’re interested go and watch people destroy games (although not literally) and donate for a good cause. And if you’re not? Why not donate anyway? It’s still a good cause. 😀

Competitive mode finally arrived for Overwatch last week, much to the joy of players everywhere. However, in some that joy quickly turned to irritation when issues that hadn’t been prevalent within the PTR build began to have a knock-on effect on their enjoyment.

The first was that MMR points weren’t being awarded equally for Control maps, as they had been for Assault, Escort or Hybrid. Blizzard already issued a fix on Thursday for that one having quickly tracked down the issue behind it, but now more have begun to surface.

Another fairly large one concerns players who might have issues with their network connections during competitive play still receiving the Loss punishment, even if they managed to return to the match within the one-minute timeout window allocated for players with such problems. Obviously, this has not gone down well.

Responding to fans who were asking whether they could expect a fix soon, Game Director Jeff Kaplan said that they were working on it and that they should “have some fixes coming (hopefully) next week.”

Also on the cards is a new and fairer way to settle draws, as opposed to the current “Coin Flip” Sudden Death decision-maker which is considered contentious right now by the playerbase.