After having talked about implementing it for over a year now, saying that some barriers stood in the way of changes for a while (such as applying another unique identifier to accounts to make sure bans and whitelisting still worked), Mojang finally announced a few weeks ago that you would finally be able to change your displayed username for Minecraft accounts.

Today this update was rolled out halfway through the day, with a little change option being added to the pages of Mojang accounts everywhere. Many people have already managed to change their old usernames that no longer suited them to newer ones that better reflected themselves, so Mojang obviously did the bug testing before they rolled it out which is nice. Not to say that there won’t be at least one, but I do love to see a new feature work as advertised straight from the off.

Now all I have to do is regain access to my first Minecraft account again so I can change the username and use it for mischief… ¬u¬

A few days ago many users of Ubisoft’s Uplay client who had purchased some of their newest games from third-party retailers logged on to find that they no longer had access to their new games – mainly Far Cry 4. When they went searching for answers, Ubisoft and EA provided them with one – the keys in question had been bought with a stolen credit card and so had been deactivated. Now however Ubisoft have re-looked into the matter and decided that as the buyers were innocent victims in this case, they will reactivate keys for players who had already begun their journey into the game.

A representative told GameInformer by e-mail: “After further investigation into the matter of keys that were fraudulently purchased on EA’s Origin store, we are reinstating keys for consumers who already had successfully activated and started playing the games. Any remaining fraudulently obtained and resold keys have been deactivated.”

However Ubisoft have said they’ll be working closely with EA in future to stop such an event happening again and if it ever does, the keys that are deactivated are very likely to stay that way. They urged the players to remember that they could only trust purchases made from trusted retailers and shops such as Uplay and Steam, and that purchases made from other third-party retailers was made at their own risk. The two main third-parties who sold the keys were Kinguin and G2A and both made statements when it was discovered that the keys had been fraudulently obtained, stating that the seller had been an unknown Russian.

An interview given to IGN has revealed some of the plans for the Star Wars: Battlefront game that’s in the works. Speaking was Design Director Niklas Fegraeus. With a new piece of concept art he spoke of the decisions made about the maps for the game.

“We have actually made the decision to specifically tailor certain maps to certain game modes, and what we get from that is not only incredibly varied scales, but also gameplay that will allow players to live out some of their most memorable Star Wars battle fantasies.”

There will apparently be great variety in the maps, with some maps such as Hoth being much larger than the foresty Endor map. Different vehicles will probably be dotted around the map as well as turret positions if it’s anything like previous Battlefront games. Many a happy hour was had between my brother and myself when in co-op play we would take a two-man tank on what was basically a suicidal charge into enemy territory. I was a dreadful tank driver, but if I wasn’t we’d never have had that moment when we realised it was possible to drive the tank up the mountains near the Rebel base on the Kashyyyk map of Battlefront 2. The thrill of that moment was amazing and it’d be a shame if the new game lacked that sort of potential for daft actions that actually pay off.

Levels have been given that extra graphical shine too, using a technique called “photogrammetry” which is a technique that uses photographs to give texturing to environments in-game. You might be too busy trying to kill and not be killed to fully appreciate them, but it’s good to see that the team is putting in the effort to make a beautiful game.

The release date for Battlefront right now is “holiday 2015” so we’ve still quite a wait to have before release. Also means plenty more news to come though, so get excited for that.

After allegations that he cheated in a Hearthstone tournament match earlier, Raphael ‘Hosty’ Tsantili has been released from his team, Archon.

The team’s official account tweeted out the news with a tweet that read:

“Archon has decided to release Hosty from the team. We in no way condone anything that would compromise the integrity of the game.”

However, the creator of the team also tweeted out on his own personal account that he didn’t think Hosty had cheated in the game and was a great guy, saying that the release of the player was not solely down to the match and the allegations of cheating made.

As for what Hosty is supposed to have done, the match was streamed out for viewers to watch. The allegation against Hosty alleges that he had the tournament stream open on his second monitor, with people saying that the reflection of this could be seen in a picture behind him. Of course, the stream was on a 10 minute delay so any information about what cards his opponent had would have been out of date, but still potentially useful to know.

The Twitch chat was where the allegations were first made, and a Reddit post was shortly made carrying the news to Redditors everywhere. The mods took it down on the rule of ‘no witch hunting’ but has since put it back up in light of the dismissal. Hosty himself has been to offer the defence that he did have the channel on his second monitor but he had it stopped at the time of play.

Right now, we don’t know 100% if there was cheating going on. What it does say is that rules need to be made in how best to conduct Hearthstone tournaments to minimise cheating and the possible accusations of cheating. Hopefully a bigger group can find some good guidelines and begin to set an example to be followed.

After all, no one likes to see a competition derailed with accusations.

It has been confirmed that a competitive Counter Strike: Global Offensive match played last year was a fixed match, with the list of people involved containing some pro-players and thousands of dollars in wagered money. Now Valve have taken action and placed bans on seven of the involved, stopping them from competing in events they have sponsored.

The match itself saw the favourites to win, team iBUYPOWER (what a strangely ironic name) lose their match against their opponents. However even at the time a few eyebrows were raised in some people, who thought that the team’s performance and demeanor suggested something was going on. Word began to slip out that the match had been rigged and eventually an eSports journalist with The Daily Dot began to dig a little deeper. What he found was that the rabbit hole indeed went very deep.

The game was rigged in order to allow for big payouts on bets made on CS:GO Lounge, a site that allows for wagers and item-trading. The site themselves had suspicions when they saw the betting patterns and traced back a number of them to a well-connected member of the pro CS:GO scene – Duc “cud” Pham.

Implicated in this were the former iBUYPOWER roster, one of North America’s top squads, as well as some other members of the CS:GO community outside the team who had advanced notice of the result and were able to make out like kings from their payout of the bets. Valve have now banned the following 7 players from events they sponsor in future:

• Duc “cud” Pham
• Derek “dboorn” Boorn
• Casey Foster
• Sam “Dazed” Marine
• Braxton “swag” Pierce
• Keven “AZK” Larivière
• Joshua “Steel” Nissan

Valve has also come out and said that as far as gambling in eSports go, no professional players, their managers or team staff should be betting on results or giving away information that could in any way influence bets.