After declaring that they were going to tackle the issue of rage-quitters in Street Fighter V last week, Capcom asked for the community’s help in identifying people who were doing it through submitting video evidence for them to look at. Now it seems that they’ve gotten enough evidence because they’ve posted about how they plan to punish people caught at it.

The punishments will be handed out to those people who have a high win ratio, but also a high disconnection rate (around 80-90%) – hopefully missing out those people who genuinely are having connection issues to their games. As for the nature of the punishments, Capcom will be docking League Points from those they deem guilty of this, which has a negative effect on online rankings – a punishment that’s already been handed out to around 30 players. Those who log in to find that they’ve been hit with this can consider this “a warning” say Capcom.

Speaking on the issue Capcom wrote: “Ever since last week, we’ve received a ton of videos both here on Unity and our social channels which we’ve been able to cross reference with our data and put together a clear picture as to which players are abusing the system. Though we were pretty confident that players in our system who had high disconnect rates were indeed those who were attempting to avoid a loss at all costs, we didn’t want to start dishing out any punishments without clear proof. We’ve been working hard with the SFV server team to put together a process to pinpoint users who are clearly abusing the system and we’re happy to announce that we can now do this without any proof of video.”

While Capcom will now be carefully monitoring accounts with high disconnect rates, they do say they’re wanting to find a more permanent solution for the rage-quitting problem though. They’ll be keeping the community up to date on their progress towards this goal.

Seems some big news for Hearthstone is due to be announced in just under a week’s time.

Blizzard have announced that there will be a big announcement related to the game coming on March 11th, just before the start of the Americas Winter Championship. It’ll be coming to the Hearthstone Twitch channel on the say, around 10am PST.

“Something inside the Tavern stirs…  what could it be? Don’t worry – you won’t be alone! Our very own Lead Designer Ben Brode and Senior Producer Yong Woo will kick off the weekend of the Americas Winter Championship with an announcement about what’s coming next for Hearthstone,” says the Battle.net post.

It’s not the first time Blizzard will have announced something new for the game just before a tournament, and if patterns hold true it’s likely that we’re about to get the announcement of a new single-player adventure expansion or maybe the next set of cards – along with some previews of upcoming new cards and new Keyword effects. With the new Standard coming into effect they do need to bolster it with some new cards after all.

As for the tournament itself, it’ll be taking place over three weekends in March with winners up for a chance to make it to this year’s Hearthstone World Championship at Blizzcon.

This week, Microsoft has touted a new initiative that they’ve said will unify platforms, making it easier to for developers to release games on both PC and Xbox One. But at least one major developer isn’t thrilled with Microsoft’s plans.

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian this morning, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney absolutely railed against Microsoft, calling upon other developers to fight against the corporation for “moving against the entire PC industry.” Specifically, Sweeney criticized Microsoft’s new Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to build games and apps that can run across all of Microsoft’s hardware including Windows 10, Xbox One, and any Windows-branded tablets and phones.

The problem, Sweeney wrote, is that with UWP, Microsoft has created a closed ecosystem where developers must use the Windows Store and go through Microsoft’s certification processes to release games on that platform. Sweeney said he sees this as contrary to the spirit of PC development—a huge blow for Microsoft, as Epic is one of the biggest companies in the space. Epic is best known not just for their developer toolset, the Unreal Engine, but for creating the popular Xbox franchise Gears of War, which Microsoft purchased in 2014.

“They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers,” Sweeney wrote.

Microsoft disagrees with this assessment. Windows vice president Kevin Gallo told The Guardian in a response to Sweeney’s op-ed that Microsoft is not, in fact, building a closed platform. “The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store,” he said. “We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.”

Sweeney had criticized Microsoft for making it difficult and confusing to install UWP-developed apps outside of the Windows Store, pointing out that any user who wants to do so would have to dig through a series of convoluted menus and options. “It’s true that if you dig far enough into Microsoft’s settings-burying UI, you can find a way to install these apps by enabling ‘side-loading,’” Sweeney wrote. “But in turning this off by default, Microsoft is unfairly disadvantaging the competition. Bigger-picture, this is a feature Microsoft can revoke at any time using Windows 10’s forced-update process.”

The whole op-ed is brutal and worth reading, encouraging developers and customers to fight against Microsoft’s new initiative.

“As the founder of a major Windows game developer and technology supplier, this is an op-ed I hoped I would never feel compelled to write,” Sweeney wrote. “But Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991. We wouldn’t let Microsoft close down the PC platform overnight without a fight, and therefore we won’t sit silently by while Microsoft embarks on a series of sneaky manoeuvre aimed at achieving this over a period of several years.”

Of course, all of Epic Games otehr games, the new Unreal Tournament, Paragon, etc are ONLY available through Epic’s own launcher, which also make you wonder if this is a case of pot and kettle…

What do you think?

With The Division coming out soon, Digmbot and  Artemiss join up to offer their opinions on what they’ve experienced so far with the game.

Digmbot

Tom Clancy’s Division is coming out in just a few days, and I’m remembering my own time spent with the beta. There was one extremely frustrating stream, and about 4 hours of off stream play. Perhaps the one thing I could say about The Division is that the shooting mechanics aren’t awful. They aren’t particularly good either, but they aren’t terrible. The game is competent. It aims to put you into an open world New York rife with waist high cover for you to crouch behind while you shoot at enemies and then loot them, and it does so. It aims to include RPG elements, and it does so.

The glaring issue I have with this is that it is not fun. The game controls fine. It isn’t particularly satisfying feeling to slowly dodge roll into cover, or clamber precariously over a car hood, but it does it when I press the button. It just feels chunky and slow. The cover mechanics such as switching between cover or vaulting over are as tried and true as the come. So is blind firing from behind cover. New York is certainly nice to look at, though not on the level they promised us in the original trailer. But all graphical complaints aside, The Division is uninspired. It takes all of the checklist boxes of an open world game, a cover based shooter, and a loot based game and doggedly ticks them off. The setting, which is admittedly intriguing can’t – for me- save gameplay that is utterly dull as dishwater. Even the loot is uninspired. In most loot based games (Diablo and Borderlands come to mind), there is an immediacy to the loot. Shiny new toys! That do crazy things! Destiny pulls this off especially well from a visual standpoint. Guns look awesome in Destiny. And in Borderlands they do insane things like shoot lightning. In The Division the guns…make slightly larger numbers pop up above enemies head’s when you shoot them. They might reduce recoil slightly. They might up your ammo count by 5 rounds in a magazine.This isn’t compelling loot. When I play Borderlands, as soon as I grab a new gun I immediately open my menu to stare at it and see if I should equip it. When I was playing The Division, I usually remembered I had new loot after 20 minutes or so when I opened the inventory for some reason and saw the little tag. It’s just not compelling, which to me is a huge problem in a loot based game.

Let’s move on to the other thing that I find most egregious about Tom Clancy’s: The Division- bullet sponge enemies. Over the years Tom Clancy games have conditioned us to expect realism. Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and the like have made it clear that these are games grounded in reality. If you shoot someone in the head with an AK-47 in Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six, they will die. In The Division, they will continue walking straight towards you as if nothing happened. Common thugs wearing nothing but hoodies can take 10 to 15 rounds to the face. This is a subjective thing, I get that. But the name Tom Clancy and bullet sponge enemies do not belong in the same game. And even beyond the idea that this is  Tom Clancy game, video games in general have conditioned me to the idea that if I shoot a baddie in the head with a real gun, he’s going to go down. If I shoot him with a hyper powered badger gun in Borderlands, ok he might not go down. Because he has shields and is a mutated psycho on the moon of a distant world. But not an AK-47 in a real looking game. Get the idea? It’s a dissonance that I can’t reconcile and it ruins a core mechanic of the game for me.

The last thing to touch on is The Dark Zone. This is the PvP area of the game, and is probably the only bit of credit I would give the game in terms of new ideas or originality. Once in the Dark Zone you and other players can team up or duke it out over loot that you can scavenge from NPCs and objectives in the zone. All of this loot is contaminated though and must be airlifted out via helicopter. Once this is done, it will be decontaminated and you can then equip it. This is a cool idea that is utterly ruined by the asinine restriction that you can only place four packs on the helicopter’s line at a time. Of course, it drives emergent stories by having players turn on one another in order to make sure their loot get out at all costs. But the other thing it does is punish you for someone else being an asshole, which is not good game design. Of course killing too many other players will mark you on the zone map and incentivize other players to take you down, something very similar to DayZ’s bandit system. I find the idea of these emergent stories to be probably the most interesting part of The Division, and especially of the Dark Zone.

I’m sure there are plenty of elements of The Division that will be discovered after launch that I didn’t get to experience yet. The problem is that what I did experience was bland enough, dull enough, cookie cutter enough and just plain not fun enough that I don’t care to experience those other moments. For me, The Division is a generic military third person shooter with some RPG elements shoehorned in that doesn’t really do anything new. I’ll pass. Maybe one day they’ll put Destiny on PC. At least it has Star Wars style speeder bikes..

ArtemissBow (aka Ranger)

Admit it, everyone saw the recent open beta for The Division, and at least considered downloading it. I was the one refreshing the page awaiting the open access. When I first saw the announcement trailers and teasers for the game, I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement. Having interactable objects in the world you don’t just glitch around, even some of the mobile aspects had be interested. I’m sure I was one of many who were mostly disappointed after seeing a much more recent E3 example of the game and gameplay, sporting a not-so-beautiful looking New York landscape and strange shooter mechanics.

My experience with the beta refreshed my view significantly. I was able to quickly forgive any graphical broken promises when I was immersed in the semi-apocalyptic Manhattan landscape. There was nothing glaringly terrible about the game graphically, and despite the fact the game presented was in beta, I encountered very few glitches. Granted, usually games that are released on console as a ‘beta’ are mostly finished so it was pretty unlikely that I would have seen too many.

The gameplay is solid, as long as you like 3rd person, cover based shooters. I do think that the game was rather standard as far as the in-game play, but I was thrilled with how the RPG elements were incorporated. It was a little disappointing to see, while my character was low level, enemies eat half a clip of damage from my assault rifle. That feeling was short-lived though, as progression was fast and I started to feel up to pace after only an hour or so of play. I am excited to see what they do with the game as far as the story is concerned, as the setup that we were exposed to, my inner science nerd is drooling. The story we were exposed to did also hint at some base building and crafting elements. These are things I was not expecting, but was happy to see! I had friends that hated the fact games like Fallout 4 had base building, and I have to believe that if you are one of those people, you might not like this aspect of The Division as well.

Another major element definitely worth mentioning is the Dark Zone. I will need to address the Dark Zone separately as the meta develops after the game releases, but aside from the dissertation I could write of speculation regarding the mechanics, I’ll use a single word: potential. The Dark Zone is absolutely brimming over with potential. Let me preface this by saying, I am generally NOT a PvP player. I have several hours into games like Destiny, DayZ, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2; but it is a rare occurrence that I venture/engage in the PvP zones of these games. I am just the type of player that enjoys PvE elements more. I have never been so happy to be wrong. I love that the zone is persistent, you do not end the PvP experience until you decide to walk back out of the door. Gamers that are sick of games like Destiny where the load screens between matches is a huge time sink for your gaming hours will love this. All you do is walk in the door, and it’s all PvP all the time.

That being said, there is little to NO motivation for aggressive players to camp the doors. When you have sweet DZ loot, you get the fashionable, gigantic yellow butt-pack that indicates you have gear that might be worth stealing. People who just walked in the door have no butt-pack and so aggressive players have no motivation just to kill you, as they won’t get anything from it other than being tagged as ‘Rogue’ which is not necessarily favorable as the whole server can then see your exact position on the map. Speaking of being announced to the server, I even liked the extraction setup for the DZ loot. It’s exciting and thrilling to try and get your precious loot out when the extraction location and time is announced to the whole server. Extraction is where you will be finding the aggressive players, so it’s treacherous. Extraction is why I really want to wait for a full impression until the meta develops, as I saw something incredible while I was playing the beta. There were high ranked/level/DPS players….actually protecting the extraction zones from aggressive players so that normal scrubs like me could get my sweet loot out of the DZ.
Long story short, The Division is an absolute yes from me. I don’t know if it will be able to replace the more flashy titles like Destiny, but it’s going to be a real contender. I will absolutely be playing this one on release.

So there you have it. What do you think about The Division so far?

Tap Heroes was released in the middle of last year to Steam. It’s an indie adventure clicker from VaragtP.

The game is simply that you are a ‘god hand’ trying to get your Heroes as far as possible through the various locations by fighting past enough monsters or creatures in a particular level before you can advance. Beating creatures gives your coins which you can then use to upgrade the abilities of both your Heroes and your ‘god hand’; which you use to more quickly beat creatures, heal quicker or just be able to endure the power of greater monsters. You can also acquire a rarer currency, the blue gem, which you can use to buy non-stat upgrades, such as a familiar pet or initially to recruit new Heroes into your party.

Your ‘god hand’ itself can be used to click upon enemies to attack them quicker than your Heroes generally can (but with less power) or to heal your Heroes by clicking upon any of them, again quicker than your Heroes can but with less power. It also has chances to get critical hits upon your enemies and all three aspects (attack, heal and critical chance) are the upgradeables for your ‘god hand’ along with a range of temporarily applied powers that you have the chance to unlock later on in the game.

At £1.99 UK or $2.99 US the game is cheap and that’s a good thing. The game looks lovely, plays well and is smooth to run on a computer – the setting seems to be a puppet theatre in which the characters and creatures are paper cutouts on sticks. While the environments passed through are of the sort you’d expect to find in an adventure game, the monsters themselves vary up quite a bit. You only need to beat 10 creatures or one boss per level so there’s not really going to be the feeling you’re fighting just the same thing unless you choose not to advance to the next level and instead grind out coins before you head on.

However, there’s a reason this game has a low price tag and that’s because quite simply… it’s a clicker game. It isn’t really made for its gameplay, rather as something to fill the time in. It won’t surprise you to find out that Tap Heroes is also available on mobile platforms as well, albeit with in-app purchases that were removed from this PC version. That is the sort of platform this game was really made for, being able to play a little bit then put away and return to later and collect the coins your heroes made for you while you were away. And the fact that you will gain a sizeable number of coins when you come back if you leave it long enough does mean that you will have more than enough for stat upgrades – which takes the challenge out of it.

Tap Heroes is not a bad game by any means. It runs well, does manage to be challenging and really is delightful to look at. The problem is, it’s not a very engaging game either purely because it is a game that suits a mobile platform better. But as a PC game, that’s a bit of a downside.

5/10