League of Legends has a system called Tribunal within it. It allowed players to review and adjudicate on reports of bad behaviour, involving the community in policing itself. Unfortunately it went down for reworks about nine months ago and still isn’t back. Players are beginning to wonder why.

Riot have apologised for the time it’s taking, but have pointed out stats that seem to prove that even without it in place, toxicity in the game is already way down thanks to other implemented measures.

This is down to a combination of Riot’s machine learning system becoming “extremely aggressive” in tackling things like racism, homophobia, sexism and death threats, which means that the metrics recently have shown such things now occurring in only 2% of matches. There’s also a new intentional feeder detection system at work and the LeaverBuster tool is working to discourage people leaving mid-game.

Tribunal’s own upgrading is taking time thanks to a need to not only tweak the backend of LoL’s report system, but also make some to chatlogs and Riot’s network of sites too. Riot says that it will bring benefits such as being able to review and reward positive in-game behaviours as well as more accurately detecting troll voters. Riot acknowledge that even with their other systems working well to cut down bad behaviour, Tribunal’s delay is not justified by it.

Cult classic Space RTS Homeworld is set to be released tomorrown. Remastered in HD and 4k by Gearbox Studios (creators of the Borderlands franchise), the collection will feature Homeworld and Homeworld 2. These are games that have cult classic status, and the new remakes look gorgeous. Don’t believe me? See for yourself!

GDC will be taking place next week, and Valve have big plans for it or so it seems. They’ve said that they will be revealing “previously unannounced SteamVR hardware system” alongside the new Steam Controller and other devices for the living room.

SteamVR is nothing new, it’s been around for a year already providing support for the Oculus Rift on Steam and was released in a patch. Now it seems to have always been the foundation for Valve’s own VR efforts, with a headset prototype having been revealed last year despite public reassurances that for the time being Valve were happy enough to support developers like Oculus rather than make their own VR devices.

Now it seems that their plans are in motion, they’re even reaching out for VR creators on Steam with a message that reads: “With the introduction of SteamVR hardware, Valve is actively seeking VR content creators. Are you a developer or publisher interested in experiencing the new SteamVR hardware? We’ll be giving scheduled VR demos during the week of GDC, March 4th-6th, 2015, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.”

I guess now we just need to wait and see the reveal to know how far along Valve are with their plans.

World of Tanks’ latest 9.6 patch is bringing some big changes in the way crew qualifications work, making it a bit less of a pain to transfer crew between vehicles. It will also add some new premium armour, one being the French AMX CDC.

Crew members and tweaking them has always been a bit of a pin in the game, and now with this new patch Wargaming are making it possible to switch qualifications between crew members, allowing you to take a member experienced in one field and be able to put him into battle with experience in another field. Wargaming said this has been done to cut down on “wasted talent among the ranks in your Garage.”

Elsewhere in the patch, Light Tanks have tweaks to make them more effective and tank destroyers have been nerfed slightly. New HD models have been introduced into game for some tanks, as well as more tanks now being available in both the premium and in-game Stores.

If you’re interested, the full set of patch notes can be found here.

There’s been a few solutions to the issues of multiplayer cheaters in games, but much of them like Valve Anti-cheat, Punkbuster and so on are software solutions. They can be coded around. Now, there’s a hardware solution to the problem being suggested.

Game:ref is the name of a prototype piece of hardware that can be connected to a PC to help detect cheats. The way it works is that it reads incoming data from your mouse and compares it to the data of what’s taking part in game to see if they match up, if they don’t then it knows there’s a good chance its caught a cheater. The makers claim that it is able to catch 100% of input-based hacks.

At first you wonder what good it is to have an anti-cheat device that only the cheater can see the feedback from, but then you consider tournaments and realise that there this could be a good thing if it works as well as it’s claimed to. If all computers were fitted with one and use was mandatory to take part, it’d give faith that all players were probably playing fairly.

The device is going to be open-source, with the idea of making collaboration with developers much easier. The project is planning to come to Kickstarter soon, hoping to raise the money to get the prototype turned into a real product.

I only hope it is as accurate as they say, otherwise it could cause a lot of confusion.