It seems that people never learn. Commonplace is the death threat online (sadly), but one gamer who made such threats to Blizzard has found himself facing five years in prison for it.

Stephen Cebula, 28, was a player in the Silver bracket of Heroes of the Storm’s ranked ladder system who unfortunately became known for his aggressive harassment of other players. Sending several message’s worth of things such as racial epithets and threats to “bomb the new york twin towers”. Not surprisingly he was reported to Blizz who quickly silenced Cebula to stop his hateful messaging habits. To say Cebula did not take this well would be an understatement.

Sending messages through Facebook, one such message from Cebula’s Facebook threatened the company’s California headquarters saying “You keep silencing me in Heroes of the Storm and I may or may not pay you a visit with an AK 47 amongst some other ‘fun’ tools.”

The messages were reported to the feds and Cebula was arrested after the FBI found several other social media accounts in his control that concerned them, including one apparently named “tedbundyismygod1” – referring to one of America’s most notorious serial killers.

According to court documents from the trial Cebula had admitted that he made the message with the intent to “scare those whom he had threatened”. He is now being held without bail due to having been judged to have ‘significant’ mental issues by the state. Cebula had previously faced psychiatric evaluation before in March of last year when he confessed to Sacramento Sherriff’s Department that had had intentions to kill someone at a local park.

His plea is expected to be entered on the 26th of the month, and right now he is facing a maximum of five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

Just a lesson for you. Death threats – they’re not funny or cool. Don’t make ’em.

Gears of War 4 is going to be the first game that will supposedly benefit from Microsoft’s newly announced Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, allowing for the ability to cross-buy and cross-play the game on either Xbox or PC. However, to be sure that the PC version doesn’t lose out, it’ll come with a few extra options to make us of the greater option of graphical power and processing speed a PC could offer the game.

Speaking in an interview, The Coalition’s technical director Mike Rayner explained the benefits of Gears on PC for players.

“Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP and we will be able to offer proper unlocked frame-rate support that gamers expect on day one. With Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher framerates. Single-player will not be locked to 30fps on PC.”

This means that with the range of tasty settings on offer, you might even be able to fit 60FPS provided everything with UWP works properly with the new support for various options players have been asking for. Among things offered will be a benchmarking tool to help measure FPS, higher resolution textures that could go up to 4K if your machine can handle it and dynamic resolution support and scaling.

Gears of War 4 is planned to release on October 11th of this year, with a beta planned to happen some time before that.

This weekend Industrial Light and Magic have been showing off a load of interesting and shiny toys to do with the Star Wars franchise, at the Star Wars Celebration event that’s been held in London’s ExCel centre. Among the things on show was a VR game/demo called Trials of Tatooine and now its been announced that the game will be made available free to Vive owners from Monday.

The game was co-written by Lucasfilm CTO Rob Bredow and Pablo Hidalgo, keeper of the Star Wars canon. Set in a time just after Luke Skywalker has defeated the Emperor, the Jedi Order is slowly being rebuilt and new hopefuls are being recruited to learn the ways of the Force.

As one of these hopeful padawan learners, you travel to Tatooine, end up aboard the Millenium Falcom and have a familiar astromech droid gift you a lightsaber to use. This is of course the thing that will appeal to fans young and old, and will be used through the experience to reflect blaster fire.

It’s nice to see such a game being made available to adopters of the new VR tech, especially since I dare say it was one of the first things most people thought of when VR started to become a larger thing.

It seems that when the public discovered that two prominent Youtubers (ProSyndicate and TmarTn) were owners of a CSGO Gambling site that they have heavily promoted without disclosure of their connection to the site a spotlight was shone upon a very secretive dark corner. A lot more has come out involving other sites and other prominent content-creators on both Youtube and Twitch. Now a set of Skype logs has been leaked that seem to implicate a Twitch streamer who became well known after he was swatted while on-air.

James “PhantomL0rd” Varga suffered the swatting back in 2013 as one of the earliest victims of the “prank”. Now a hacker aiming to steal from a French target, Duhau Joris, a French web developer who owns the domain of gambling site CSGOShuffle, has leaked out to Richard Lewis a games and esports journalist. Watch his video here:

The Skype logs in question seem to prove that PhantomL0rd has at least a vested interest in the site, if not having some part in owning the business. Previously the streamer had claimed that the site only sponsored him when questions were raised in the wake of the CSGOLotto scandal earlier.

There are also implications that streamed pots might have been rigged in order to make the site more enticing to viewers by showing what could be won if they are only willing to come along and bet away their in-game items and skins in hopes of winning more.

Others implicated in this include cAre, one of the most well-known and prolific skin gamblers in the CS:GO trading scene right now, in that he might too have taken part in pots he knew were rigged (logs to do with his involvement are being translated still from the native French of cAre and Joris); as well as suggestions that PhantomL0rd is aware that another CSGOWild is affliated with an eSports organisation, FaZe. He also seemed to know of Syndicate’s involvement with CSGOLotto as far back as November of last year.

“Also [CSGOLotto] the syndicate site and [CSGOWild] by the cod faze guys,” Varga says. “I’m talking to both looking into what they’re doing and if its [sic] a threat or not.”

In the wake of exposure of shady and underhanded dealings to do with many CSGO gambling sites and content creators, Valve has recently put a stop to third-party gambling sites as they were ruled to violate Terms of Service that had been in place since 2010.

As always, when watching a content creator always be wary. Even with rules and laws in place, sometimes things aren’t always as they seem.

A community manager for Battlefield has updated the situation on when we can expect there to be an open beta for the latest Battlefield game, Battlefield 1.

During a livestream interview through Reddit, community manager Sebastian Moritz hinted that the open beta time was set to kick off sometime “shortly after” this year’s Gamescom even, which will run from August 17th to August 21st. This puts the beta launching somewhere in the later part of August, probably during the last week or maybe even during the first week of September. No dates were confirmed but given that Gamescom is going to happen before the beta it’s possible they might announce some during that event.

When it does arrive Battlefield Insiders will be getting their access three days earlier to hit the ground running, as well as being offered some “in-game rewards, exclusive content and sneak peeks at news about Battlefield”, probably before its released publicly.

Among other things confirmed during that livestream interview was the inclusion of a Rush mode, among other things. Check the Reddit topic for more information and a link to the Twitch channel containing the interview.