Overkill Software plan to celebrate the third anniversary of Payday’s release in style. This coming October they’re going to hold an event they’ve dubbed “Crimefest” with multiple reward milestones that are determined by the number of people in the Payday 2 Steam group. And they’ve just hit 1,050,000 members, which means a freebie.

On October 18th, all members of the Payday 2 Steam group will have a chance to get Payday: The Heist for free. To keep. Forever. That’s a pretty good deal. And there’re more member goals to reach, such as DLC quests, new weapons… it goes on and on.

If you’re interested in getting the game and possibly more, go over to the Payday 2 Steam group and hit join. If you haven’t already gotten the game, now could be a very good opportunity to get it.

Payday 2 Steam group: [x]

If you’re like me, you’ve grown tired of playing the vanilla version of Minecraft. After a few hours it stops offering much new to build or do, unless you’re in it for the endgame. And after that, then what? The answer for many of us is to dip into the large world of Minecraft mods, including the modpacks which are so popular right now.

However, if you’re trying them out for the first time modded Minecraft can be a pain to use, and you need to pay attention especially to the version of Minecraft a mod or modpack uses. This became much easier with the second version of the Minecraft launcher which allowed for the launching of the present and past versions of the game, but matching mods to other mods in a game can be a tricky business, especially if they don’t all run on the same version of Minecraft. So what gives? Why aren’t all mods updated to 1.7.10 already, or 1.7.9 at the very least?

Earlier on the /r/minecraft sub-reddit board user Vazkii tried to explain the process of updating a mod and the reasons why it might take a long time. At the basic level, javacode is often very confusing and messy to our human eyes; difficult to make sense of. A computer though has no problems doing so, which is why the game will still run properly. And hard-to-read code is only the start of a mod-maker’s problems. For one thing, each version of Minecraft will edit the rules of how something might be read by the computer.

“Minecraft code is actively changed, removed, moved, renamed, repurposed, so on. Every version something changes, because if it didn’t change, there’d be no need for a new version right. And of course, every mod that relies on that will break.” they wrote, giving examples such as the time the game updated from reading an ID number to a string to determine what a block was supposed to be made of and its ‘rules’ of behaviour within the game engine such as durability and whether or not you can mine it with a stone pickaxe or need something tougher.

Every time Mojang update their code, so do the mod-makers. And from experience, I can tell you that it’s time-consuming, often tedious work. After all, making sure that a mod is reading information from the right place takes time, as does updating all the relevant strings to read from the right areas of other code you might have once input. Even one mis-spelling could bring all that wonderful coding crashing down to a very frustrating halt.

If you want to read the full thing, the link is here: [x]

DayZ’s experimental servers have just gotten a fairly relevant update concerning the respawning and persistence of loot in-game. Namely the fact that it can now respawn without the server owner needing to restart it or do a refresh that amounts to the same.

Before now most servers would have to do a refresh every few hours to make sure the map wasn’t completely picked clean of all loot, which basically meant until now there was no such thing as night-time in Chernarus. This new update means that a day-night cycle can finally run properly in game without players having to resort to their fists and running every time they encounter a zombie or two. Dropped loot will also remain on the ground now without despawning, even between server restarts. This means that the pickings are no longer so slim in the zombie-filled wasteland of the apocalypse.

Other notable aspects of the update are the introduction of a new weapon; the CR-527 Carbine and a new model for the random cows you can find wandering around to slaughter for their meat.

Riot have been running an experiment within the MOBA game League of Legends in an attempt to see if they could clean up the community better with a strict policy as opposed to their usual ‘redemption’ methodology. One Redditor decided to see just how well this method was working.

PersianMG created a perl script that has collected the data from 100,000 of the recent Tribunals in the North America server regions, although due to the removal of Tribunal pages the sample pool is actually closer to 10,000 cases. The data was collected from the online Tribunal pages to see just how big a percentage of people were being punished or banned from the game as the crackdown on “extreme toxicity” went ahead.

The results revealed that in the majority of cases summoners were punished for their actions, although most of the punishments came in the form of ‘first-time warnings’. Just over 1000 summoners, a percentage of around 1.1% were actually permabanned from the game, while just under 8% of Tribunals resulted in a pardon or were dismissed. One of the most common complaints were racist chatter; one of the things Riot wished to cut down upon.

Well there’s been rumours about it happening since May and now it seems that it’s become official. Google have bought the popular gaming-streaming platform Twitch for an estimated $1 billion through their Youtube division.

The previous rumours were not confirmed in any way by either party in the past, although there had been some concerns that the acquisition might be stopped by the US Justice Department. This was down to the fact that Twitch represented Youtube’s only major competition for the streaming of big eSports events, so the purchase could be seen as anti-competition. Although not publicly announced the news was spread via VentureBeat through sources there.

There had previously been other concerns about Google’s purchase of Twitch from the site’s regular viewers and also people who use the Youtube site for their videos. The previous year has brought about a lot of unpopular changes to the video-streaming platform and a wave of content strikes against content creators, especially those who review video games. There have also been those who pointed out that the acquisition of Twitch could be seen as Youtube and Google attempting to support the gaming video community.

Do you see Google’s purchase of Twitch as a good thing or a bad thing? Or somewhere in between? Comment below and let us know!

VentureBeat article: [x]