One of the things that’s made Overwatch stand out is its Play of the Game clip at the end of a round; right now there’s an ongoing meme that inserts a totally random clip as the ‘play’ which I love personally. But it does make the comment that at times, the PoTG does need a little work. The play is often a long string of enemy kills in a row and if a Torbjorn player got the best kill string through his turret while dead… well, watching a dead body for a minute while those kills pop up onscreen isn’t exactly thrilling viewing.

Another complaint is that because of the way it seems to favour the long kill strings, the PoTG often goes to offensive characters as opposed to maybe a Support who did something cool and turned the match around for their team. Blizzard are listening however and are trying to improve the formula used to determine these plays.

Lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton explained this in a Gamespot interview saying: “From a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there. We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.

“We also have a lot of cool systems internally where we can play with the algorithm that determines Play of the Game and play the same game back again, and be like, “Okay if I tweak these numbers, what’s going to be the Play of the Game that gets picked this time?” So it might’ve been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden its Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”

In the interview he does say that some improvements have already been made, so that the algorithm takes into account the difficulty of shots made, using the speed of the player and the distance to calculate the ‘coolness’ of the shot. More changes are to come soon, so hopefully we’ll slowly begin to see a slide towards an equal showing of all characters for PoTG.

After all, I’ve seen some really cool ones from the lesser shown characters including one Lucio wall-running shot that managed to leave three enemy players down. That sort of play deserves more recognition really.

Since it’s release, GTA V has been having update after update released by their developer Rockstar to keep the game fresh and the people playing. It’s working because even after years of release, GTA Online is still pretty popular, and now Rockstar are adding the biggest update to date.

Following on from Executives and Other Criminals, the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony expansion will allow you to become the CEO of your own criminal business. Not bad.

Things it will come with include the possibility of a skyscraper headquarters for your high-flying criminal entrepeneur as well as warehouses to store loot and even sell it from. Of course, you’ll still need to deal with other criminals attempting to bust up your operations and sometimes even the LSPD will come calling – but these encounters bring the chances of rarer and unique items that carry the highest profit so there’s reward in the risk.

There will also be new vehicles added as well as many other features typical of a GTA update, when the expansion releases June 7th.

Well, that didn’t take long. It seems that despite Blizzard making their policy on cheaters clear as being very harsh, forums for multiplayer game cheats are already beginning to list Overwatch maphacks for sale at $15 per month subscription.

The hacks take player data on positions as the game runs and then overlays rectangles over both enemy and ally positions so you can get more of an idea what’s around the corner. It works a bit like Widowmaker’s ultimate, or Hanzo’s Sonic Arrow, but that hasn’t stopped some people from messing around with creating these hacks anyway.

As mentioned above, Blizzard have made it perfectly clear that they will not tolerate anyone cheating in their new game. Given that the game has become so popular, Blizzard have said that anyone caught and proven to be cheating during matches will be permabanned immediately, no second chances. This stance is likely to deter people from cheating before they even think about doing it.

Already there’s been accusations being thrown around about people cheating, including some high-level players in pro teams being accused of such underhanded stunts. So far though as there’s been no concrete evidence of this, Blizzard have yet to ban any of the high-level players from the game.

Out of all the ‘rules of the Internet’ it’s probably safe to say that Rule 34 is the one most people have heard of – “If it exists, there is porn of it.” Overwatch despite having only just released is no exception, having spawned from a failed MMO project called Titan and since then it’s been majorly hyped by Blizzard and gained a lot of traction during the free Open Beta it had a few weeks back. Now it seems that Blizzard has decided that some of that porn isn’t a-okay, because quite a few people are getting takedown notices.

Of course, during the aforementioned beta, the searches for said porn jumped over 800% according to a release from Pornhub with Tracer being the most popularly searched for character. The problem is, as I said when I actually covered this jump earlier on, most of this porn is being made through Valve’s Source Filmmaker kit. This means that a lot of it is nothing more than assets ripped straight from the game, having genitalia added and then… well, you know. In many cases it’s Blizzard’s right to protest when really its their full game assets that they made, as opposed to rigs and models made by someone else as is the case for a number of other video game characters in Source.

One porn creator has already taken to Reddit to talk about the takedowns and see if they can’t get a community effort together to make Blizzard stop. I’m not sure it’ll go down well really, but you have to give them credit for trying.

Based on screencaps of the notices posted to the topic, it seems that its not Blizzard themselves filing the takedowns but a digital platform security company called Irdeto. Most likely they’ve been hired by Blizzard to clean up the mess, as the leap in Overwatch porn searches was fairly well covered by a lot of media outlets online that deal with gaming primarily – Blizzard probably doesn’t want that sort of reputation especially not with young fans around and really… you can’t blame them for that no matter how sex positive you are. Like it or not, some people would rather not see or hear about it and that’s perfectly fine.

Overwatch is live and Blizzard has revealed the prices for Loot Boxes—random assortments of skins, stencils and hero icons.

– 2 Loot Boxes: $1.99/£1.59
– 5 Loot Boxes: $4.99/£3.99
– 11 Loot Boxes: $9.99/£7.99
– 24 Loot Boxes: $19.99/£15.99
– 50 Loot Boxes: $39.99/£31.99

I am a little surprised, but really I shouldn’t have been…

You can earn loot boxes just by playing the game, and it’s hard to imagine a snazzy loot box stencil giving anyone the edge in battle.

You can easily earn two in a 45 minute play session, which is a good hourly rate by all accounts.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments