At the moment eSports are becoming a very big industry, with a lot of money being exchanged and made through tournaments watched by eyes from all around the world. That being said, in some ways major eSports is still a fairly young industry and now a story has emerged from a South Korean team, alleging that the coaching staff of the team badly mistreated the actual pro players.

Mighty Storm is one of the top Overwatch Korean teams has provided a statement to an eSports site in the country describing the conditions they say they were forced to endure. They’ve said that among other things that practice times extended from noon to 4-5am, with only one or two meals a day of ‘2-3 quail eggs and pre-made kimchi and kongjaban’ (a sweet and salty bean paste) and while they could get more meals it was at the player’s expense to do so. What’s more, they claim to have been made to sleep in a single bedroom with 10 people in the room or a living room with 4 people to the room.

There are also claims of not having been paid for events they’ve already competed in, and detailed incidents that occurred during some of those events. Before the final match the team played against Lunactic-Hai, a very strong Overwatch team who took them out of that tournament on November 16th, they claim to have been told by coaches that ‘you guys will probably lose 3-0 today’ and weren’t provided any strategic advice. Upon being knocked out, they were told that they ‘did not deserve to eat’ and the players were given no more meals for the day. A prior loss on October 19th saw the players being screamed at to leave the vehicle home and forced them to walk 40 minutes back to the team house, only to be greeted with a statement that ‘you aren’t even worth the effort to teach’.

One player, Gang ‘SIP’ Jun Hyeong, expressed a desire to leave the team but was told by management that if he did he’d be in breach of contract. He was then told that if the management reported him to KeSPA (Korean eSports Association) for this breach, he would never be able to play Overwatch professionally again.

On the other side, the management and coaching staff dispute all this. They claim that the captain of the team, Jun Hyeong, has not fulfilled obligations in his one-year contract and so therefore they had not released the funds to him until these things were done. They also say that no underfeeding of players ever happened and that the coaches told the players that “if you continue to practice this way, you will lose 3-0” rather than outright calling them useless.

KeSPA has stepped in to mediate the dispute, with the Mighty Storm players being given legal support according to the chairman Byung-Hun Jun.

“We have received extensive reports of this unfortunate happening over the last month,” Jun said. “eSports has multiple teams across numerous games, but we are aware that not all players are guaranteed the proper rights that a professional gamer deserves. The fact that pro gamers are often young further exacerbates problems when it comes to gaining the required resources and support of a properly constructed contract.”

Minecraft has had its next big patch update with Vanilla 1.11 coming in, dubbed the Exploration Update. It introduces a small number of new things to the world, as well as a good deal of bug fixes.

The big thing that many have been talking about is the addition of one of the new mobs, llamas – a new passive mob with some of the same mechanics as horses. Llamas will be found in Extreme Hill biomes and can be tamed by climbing on their backs and being kicked off a number of times until it is ‘tamed’. Unlike horses though, llamas will attack back with a spit that takes off 1 hitpoint or half a heart of health. Once tamed you can place carpet and chests onto your tamed llama, and each colour of carpet will have a different design – for example the purple one has an Enderman motif and the white one comes with a nice little neckachief. Although you can climb on the back of a llama the best way to direct them is via a lead, which will then cause all the other nearby llamas to follow on behind in a train, even the wild ones and babies! They drop leather upon death.

Other mobs introduced in this patch take the form of two forms of ‘anti-Testificate’ also known as “Illagers” as well as a small mob that one of them can summon. Both form of Illager are hostile to both the player and Villagers/Testificates, but their methods of attack are pretty different. The one with a physical assault form of attack is known as a Vindicator (with blue pants), and upon seeing an opponent will pull out an Axe and charge forward to attack. The other Illager is called an Evoker (with the gold trimmed robes) and upon seeing an opponent will pull their arms apart to summon small ghost-like mobs with Iron Swords known as Vexes. Vexes can go through blocks and will attack nearby targets but expire on their own after a certain amount of time. Evokers can also spawn ‘Fangs’ which aren’t mobs themselves but more a method of attacking hostiles or enemies. Both spawn inside of a new type of structure called Woodland Mansions, which are buildings of wood and cobblestone you can find dotted around the map rarely. Evokers drop a new drop called the Totem of Undying or sometimes an Emerald upon death; while Vindicators drop Emeralds and an Iron Axe.

Villagers themselves have something new as well, with a new ‘type’ of Villager added to the professions they can have. A Cartographer is a type of Librarian Villager and trading enough with them will give you access to special Exploration Maps – Ocean help you locate Ocean Monuments and the Woodland ones help you to locate Woodland Mansions. There’s also been a type of ‘untradeable’ Villager called a Nitwit added; Farmer Villagers can now give different amounts of apples or cookies on trade and all Villagers can now be named via Nametags.

Other things added to the game include a drop from the Shulker mobs introduced in a previous patch, they now have a 50% chance to drop a Shulker Shell upon death. Two Shulker Shells put on top of and below a Chest in a Crafting Table will make a Shulker Box, which is another way to store items but keeps what you put into it if you destroy and pick up the Shulker Box. It can also be dyed different colours, but unlike chests will not connect to become doubles. They open with an animation similar to how a shulker opens its shell just with a bit more spinning.

There has also been a block called an Observer added, ported over from other versions of Minecraft. An Observer will watch the block in front of it and when it detects a ‘block update’ it sends a redstone signal out of its back port. This block will probably be useful for map makers to get circuits across gaps without having to build a bridge for a line of redstone or similar.

This is just a taste of what 1.11 is bringing into the game. If you want to reach all the patch notes, you can see them here.

And stop by our own Sanitarium.FM server at www.sanitarium.fm. We’ve already set up a llama pen!

Those of you who’ve been browsing the net in the last day or so might have noticed people talking about Assassin’s Creed 2 a bit. Usually accompanied by a shot of this poor fellow here:

Assassin’s Creed 2 has been remastered for the Xbox One and frankly, it seems like the game was either a nightmare to remaster or the people on it were rushed, given that the NPC above isn’t the only thing people have pointed out is a little… odd with the game.

Polygon did a nice little comparison video on the original verses the remastered version, but let me sum it up by saying this. The remaster has shed a little more light on a lot of the game, but seems to have taken that NPC’s face and a lot of the movement fluidity to make up for it. What’s more the leap to the hay bale is no longer a dive but a backwards flop. The game has still gotten many improvements, just some things haven’t quite made that leap across so fluidly. It seems that unlike Skyrim, a remaster isn’t for every game that we once loved…

People have been referring that famous incident a few years back where a women ‘retouched’ a priceless painting of Jesus Christ. I can see why.

The question of transparency is always a hot topic in the Youtube and livestreaming community. There are rules set out for what constitutes as proper disclosure, but even then not all content creators follow it fully and it doesn’t cover all eventualities. I mean, it didn’t stop this year’s big CS:GO gambling scandal that seemed to have its roots spread all over the place for instance. At the same time, with the widespread use of adblockers, many content creators need to do these sponsorship deals to help them manage their bills and everything else. So there’s no question that promotional content is necessary, but not all creators will disclose things if they feel it’ll bring down audience numbers.

EA doesn’t have a great reputation with gamers right now, but it seems that the company is using proper transparency for their products to help win back some of the audience. They’ve just established a set of new rules that require streamers and other content creators to use special labels to indicate content that is promotional in nature or in some way supported by EA.

In an announcement on their German site, EA made an announcement about the new rules stating (in a rough translation):

“Gamers and viewers must be able to see whether they are independent and editorial content, supported placements of messages, or advertising. Any YouTuber, streamer or otherwise active influencer, who enters into a collaboration with Electronic Arts in their content creation and does not yet use their own labeling system, is now requested to use our Hashtags and Watermarks.”

The disclosure will fall into two groups – #supportedbyEA, which covers content that EA has supported (such as invitations to shows, covering travel expenses etc.) but has no direct influence over the creation of the content; and #advertisement, which is actual advertising and covers content that EA has had a hand in creating, had some editorial influence on or maybe even just they created themselves.

The hashtag must be placed directly in the message for things like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram; while video content needs to have the watermark displayed or EA’s involvement needs to be “explicitly mentioned” at the beginning of the video.

Although the announcement was made on the German site, it’s been confirmed that these rules are going to apply across the board. Given that Warner Bros. Interactive got off fairly lightly earlier this year and the aforementioned CS:GO scandal, we can only guess that soon people who fall foul of these rules will soon begin to try the patience of the authorities and get hit much harder.

There has been on shortage of speculation floating around about the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo’s new console looks to be something unique, but almost no information has been released about it, save that it exists and is a hybrid portable/tv based console. Eurogamer,  however, has picked up on a very interesting rumor. Many Nintendo fans are well aware that Pokemon Sun and Moon released today. Rumors have surfaced that the games may get a release on the Nintendo Switch under the moniker Pokemon Stars. If true, this would mark the first time that a mainline Pokemon game has appeared on a Nintendo console. While we won’t know anything for sure until Nintendo’s January conference focused on the Switch, we can certainly hope the rumor is true….