There’s always an element of chance when it comes to loot drops in MMO and similar games. While you know it is possible to get something useful, there are always times when you have runs of majorly bad luck and land only items that you can’t use with your class and race set-up or worse, are completely not worth the effort.

Knowing this, a while ago Blizzard introduced a ‘currency system’ to their raid system so players who fought the same raid boss multiple times trying to get certain items but never did could instead use the accumulated ‘justice points’ or ‘valor points’ to buy that item instead. But now, they feel that the system has evolved in such a way that the currency will no longer be necessary to counteract the bad luck RNG, so will be removing it from Warlords of Draenor.

“The traditional role of valor was to offer compensation for bad luck – and that goes all the way back to badges in Burning Crusade,” said lead encounter designer Hazzikostas. “The bonus rolls system that we have these days actually goes a long way towards helping counteract that. We think we can take the bonus rolls system and make it a little bit more intelligent, so that it tries to avoid giving you duplicate loots… It removes a little bit of the grind and a little bit of the awkwardness of the current valor system.”

The rolls system was introduced in patch 5.0 and gives players a chance to ‘reroll’ loot received, with the chance of the new loot being something more useful to your character’s class and set-up increasing with each new roll.

A two-currency system also operates on the PvP part of the game and while Blizzard feels that PvP still needs currency, they are hoping to remove one of the currency systems from PvP too to further simplify how the game works.

“We are trying to get rid of one of the two, but at the end of the day a purely random system probably would not work as well for higher PvP gear,” Hazzikotas said. “Conquest makes a lot of sense.”

Today sees the release of a new Minecraft version! Not 1.8 though, rather 1.7.5 with a promised 1.7.6 version to follow soon.

Minecraft version 1.7.5 brings with it some server-side optimisation and fixes as well as a stamping out a few game bugs. The main thing that 1.7.5 brings to the game of Minecraft though has to do with Minecraft Realms. Several of the community’s most popular mini-game maps, such as Survival Games etc. are now available to add to Realms as ‘mini-games’ for the Realm community to try. Mojang are also using this update to pave the way for more countries to have access to the Realms feature, planning to roll it out across the Nordic countries in Europe within the next week.

Mojang are also going to soon release a 1.7.6 version in March which will bring with it support for the new skin system that is currently only accessible if you are running snapshots with your game, as well as beginning to set up the system to change game names (although they say that actually changing names is still a way off). They will also continue to work on 1.8 snapshots as well.

New version announcement is here.

An update is coming soon for Battlefield 4, and by the sounds of it, it should be a well received one. There will finally be a way for friends to group up before entering the server as opposed to having to waste time trying to meet up before the action can begin.

DICE seemed to have no plans to ever add private lobbies to the game even a few months ago despite it being part of the previous game Battlefield 3, saying that the feature hadn’t offered quality on par with what they felt the players should be offered; but it seems that player demand and complaints about the system BF4 did have has won out once again and gotten the private lobby system, named ‘Platoons’ added to the game. Platoons will soon enter into a Closed Beta stage with a selected number of people being allowed to test-drive it for a short while and potentially give feedback to catch any bugs before it will be released to the masses, allowing matches to run a little more organised from the get-go.

At least… as organised as FPS games can ever be when you’re running around trying to kill without being killed…

A recent patch has also removed one persistent source of the game freezing; the (as DICE put it) ‘so called sound loop bug’ as well as a glitch that sometimes stopped people in a gunner position on some vehicles from actually shooting and better integrated the game with AMD’s Mantle card.

There’s a new post up on the Starbound site’s blog, in which creator Tiy outlines the future player progression of the game. It’s certainly… interesting.

Tiy talks about planets in the future game becoming inaccessible for players until they have the needed upgrades and technology to land and venture onto them (the example used is one of a planet without a breathable atmosphere), as well as a crucial change to the ship you start in: your fuel hatch will be broken and you won’t be able to visit new worlds until you get enough pixels to make yourself another one. A new quest system will teach the player how to farm, how to find trophies in dungeons and how to begin to build settlements… there will even be small ‘outpost’ settlements on some planets which will be populated by NPCs of all species and should be safe for trading etc.

The biggest change though is the removal of the multiple sectors that have so far been the setting for the game of Starbound, instead trading them for what seems to be just one area filled with planets and stars that you must work your way up to being able to land upon and three different ‘progression’ paths: farming, adventuring and building. There will also be three different seperate ‘sectors’ in the game, one for the survival-esque game, a PvP version of the game and a ‘creative sector’.

In his post Tiy says that they are doing this to make the game less linear, but at the moment this gamer thinks that the new updates sound almost the opposite, taking away a lot of area from the game and forcing the player to do certain tasks before they can progress. Sure there is no time limit or deadline for completing these tasks, but I for one will miss the multiple sectors of galaxy. As always though, nothing can be fully and accurately summed up through words alone, so we shall wait and see how these proposed changes have an affect on the game.

Blog post is here.

Before Microsoft bought out Nokia’s mobile division, rumours were spreading that Nokia planned to release phones running versions of Android as a new investment in the company’s future. Indeed, pictures released online of a supposed new Nokia phone seemed to show that a prototype was at least being worked on prior to or during the deal taking place. However, with Microsoft having its own, long-established mobile OS in the form of Windows Phone; and with Google, who “owns” Android, being a major rival to Microsoft, it’s fair to say a lot of us saw Microsoft as putting paid to that plan with their buyout.

Last night, at the start of the Mobile World Conference, the new Microsoft-owned Nokia phone division took to the stage… but to our surprise, it WASN’T to promote the existing Lumia range of Nokia-branded Windows Phones. Instead, what was revealed was a new range of smart phones, known simply as “X”, which run… Android?!?

Pictured above: The Nokia XL with the customised Android Build on display. Other phones in the X range have a smaller profile, but all run the same system and have the same choice of colourful backplates to select from.

The announcement comes only a short while after Microsoft announced its willingness to keep Nokia’s legacy alive and allow Windows phones to target lower as well as higher-end markets, following Nokia’s own established business practices. However, there’s no plans for the X range of phones to hit major markets like US, Korea and Japan – the X line is apparently geared more towards the emerging markets of lesser countries, where interest in new technology is high but the economies are low (which probably rules out the UK too, but nothing’s been said there yet).

The phones themselves take a lot of design cues from the pre-existing Nokia Asha 503, consisting of the same matte polycarbonate chassis but without the transparent crystallic case surrounding it. So far three models of the phone have been announced: The X phone – out right now for 89 Euro – is 10.4mm thick and sports a 4-inch LCD screen with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, a 3-megapixel camera, a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 1,500mAh removable battery, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD expansion up to 32GB and 512MB of RAM. For ten Euro more, Nokia will soon release the X+, which bumps up the RAM another 256MB and comes with a 2GB microSD card included, but is otherwise exactly the same. Finally, announced for the second quarter of 2014, the third model is the XL, which sports a five-inch screen, TWO cameras – a 5-megapixel rear snapper and a 2-megapixel front with an LED flash, 768MB of RAM and 4GB of built-in storage along with the microSD support. This has an expected retail price of 109 Euro. All three phones are dual-SIM, so separate SIM cards can be utilised for phone and data plans – a practice common in these emerging markets.

While the new Nokia X phones may run Android, however, they’re far from a pure Android experience – instead, the whole experience has been customised using a mix of Microsoft and Nokia’s own design cues, resulting in an experience that, perhaps unsurprisingly, looks similar to Windows Phone. As you’d also expect, this customised Android experience also ditches all the usual Google services with Microsoft or Nokia-branded alternatives – the sole exception being the internet browser, which is built on a mobile version of Opera. The X launcher consists of a series of neatly lined-up tiles; and unlike Windows Phone, which only recently added folder support via add-ons released by Nokia itself, the X line has folder support built-in for those who like to keep their apps organised. Keeping with the “similar to the Asha” theme, the X phones also have Fastlane; here it takes the form of a side menu which is the X’s version of a notification menu; and logs most-used apps, nearly all of your activities, open apps and background processes on the same page in a neatly organised manner.

The new X phones even have their own App Store, in the Nokia Store. This store contains modified versions of Android apps specifically designed for the X line of phones, but Nokia say a developer needs to add no more than a few extra lines of code to a standard Android app to make it compatible. Nokia then curate the store, deciding if apps go in or need changing. But if the app you’re looking for is nowhere to be found in the Store, a screen pops up with suggestions for other third-party app stores which should feature that particular title. Nokia also claim that as the X phones are built around Android’s OSP, sideloading APKs and apps are also possible, potentially allowing anything to run that would run on a standard Android phone – and I’d put money down on resourceful developers calling their bluff soon enough.

Nokia also state that the system itself; and the individual apps contained within will receive regular updates according to consumer demand, which should act as a reassurance that the phone won’t lag behind current Android releases or end up stuck on the same version forever – a common problem with Android phones – unless it sells badly. Honestly, this is an article I never expected to write and it colours me as quite impressive, but will it come up trumps for Microsoft and Nokia? And if it does, will it be at the expense of Windows Phone itself? Only time will tell.