RuneScape has been going now for fifteen years. It’s been around a very long time, and that means as all games have people who cheat and abuse the rules, it’s got an awful lot of banned accounts in the game – all with their own inventories. Now Jagex, the developers of the game have announced that they plan to do something with all that frozen loot – auction it off!

The way it’ll be done is through an activity called Bank Bidders, inspired by Storage Wars where players will get to bid on the contents of a banned account’s inventory – but they won’t know exactly what it is they’re bidding for until they’ve won it. This could mean you end up with an inventory of nothing, or be lucky enough to get the ill-gotten spoils of an account that was banned for abusing an XP exploit.

It’s not a complete mystery though, the players will at least get told how old the account was when banned and how the account ended up being under the banhammer in the first place.

It’s certainly an interesting way of dealing with the backlog of items lost to the ban void.

Anyone who thought that Valve’s action yesterday against Digital Homicide was going to be the end of the story, think again. The studio’s put out a statement about Valve’s actions and they’re not happy, saying that they’re going to… file another case of legal action this time against Valve.

Anyone else getting deja vu right now?

For those of you who’ve somehow missed out (and why? Go read the other article I linked in the first paragraph!), Digital Homicide have gotten a bit of a reputation for churning out games that are very similar and, it has to be said, not really that great either. The entire debacle started when they took offence at a review of one of their games by notorious critic, Jim Sterling. That ended in a lawsuit filing against Sterling for ‘libel and slander’, one that they’ve turned to crowdfunding to get running (no, seriously).

Due to this, a group of Steam users set up a group called Digital Homicides to act as some sort of self appointed watchdog group for the games the studio churned out. The studio got fed up with this, and filed a second lawsuit against some 100 Steam users for harassment among other things. In order to get the real names of these users they filed a subpoena with Valve to get those names. And Valve, having had enough of this, removed all of Digital Homicide’s games from the Store, as well as all traces of any Greenlight games they put up – past, present, failed, in-progress and successful. Ouch.

Still the funniest thing to have come out of this.

Now on their site the studio has made a statement stating:

“I’d like to give some context to [Valve communications director Doug Lombardi’s] offficial statement: “Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”” What has actually transpired was a lack of resolution from Steam in regards to moderation of their platform which might sound like a tough job to do, but coming from a company that brags its profitability per employee is higher than google, it just shows a reckless disregard for for the well being of their community for profits.”

They then go on to assert that this means that Valve is supporting the user’s harassment of them, saying that it’s okay for these users to threaten families and the lives of Digital Homicide staff, but that if they attempt to seek reparations that’s not allowed.

“The only thing that prevented me seeking legal counsel for a long list of breach of contracts, interference with business, and anti-trust issues was the fear of losing my family’s income. Since that has been taken away I am seeking legal representation. The case will benefit from a long list of organized documentation of events that have happened over the past 2 years including dates, screenshots, emails, and more on over 100 infractions in need of litigation.”

The statement ends with an e-mail address for anyone interested in taking up the case to contact them.

Let’s get this out of the way now – death threats on the Internet, while often never seriously meant, are not cool and neither are threats against a person’s family or friends. However, deleting fair if negative criticism of a work, as well as threatening legal action against people who don’t like your work is also not cool and does not win people over to your way of thinking.

This probably isn’t over by a long shot. Stay tuned for more updates.

Battle.net has a system set up for their ‘Battletag’, which is the username you display when playing any of Blizzard’s games. Your tag can only be so long (which is why mine is cut down to ‘PredictedCy’ right now), and has a 4-digit code slapped to the end which you either need to memorise or look up every time you’re you’re trying to tell people what your tag is.

Up until recently, you could only change that tag once after making it. It was free to do, but after that change that was it – that was your lot. You could never change it again so if you ended up disliking the change, you were stuck with it. Now however it seems there’s been a quiet little update and you can change your Battletag as often as you’d like – provided you’re willing to pay for it.

The first change is still free, but every change after that needs the new Battletag Name Change which is now available as a Battle.net Game Service for the price of $10. You’re allowed to buy and change your tag as often as you want to, so if you’re the sort to change your mind on your online tag often, you’re now able to keep your Battletag up to date like your other accounts.

Blizzard don’t seem to have announced this change anywhere, but people have been asking for it for a while so I don’t see anyone complaining about it.

In recent times game studio Digital Homicide have become more famous for the lawsuits they’ve been issuing than having good games (which they don’t). Last year they served one against outspoken critic Jim Sterling for ‘libel and slander’ asking for a $10 million settlement. Then about a week ago they issued another one, this time against 100 Steam users for ‘stalking harassment and criminal impersonation’. The only issue is that they only had access to the usernames of these users, so they served Valve with a subpoena for the identities of those users.

And how did Valve respond? By removing all traces of Digital Homicide’s games, both from the Store and from Greenlight.

To be fair, we can’t say that we’re surprised that Valve finally got fed up of Digital Homicide’s bullshit. They were asking for around $18 million in ‘damages’ in the lawsuit filed with an Arizona Courthouse, with co-founder James Romine being the one responsible for it. The users in question were involved with a Steam group called “Digital Homicides” and formerly “Poop Games”, which described itself as a “a dedicated consumer-advocacy group and censorship safe haven.” This was in light of Digital Homicide’s afore-mentioned incident with Sterling a few months back.

Valve’s response has hit all eighteen of the studio’s available games in the Store, and according to SteamDB’s history here more than thirty titles that were in Greenlight have been canned. A statement issued by Doug Lombardi, Valve’s communications director simply said: “Valve has stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”

Seems like a little taste of karma has finally hit. We’ll keep you updated on developments, because given the past of this studio there’s bound to be some.

If you have beta access for Frontier’s massive space sim game, get ready – the beta for the next big update is going up next week.

Update 2.2, The Guardians, will be available for beta testers to try out from September 20th. It will bring along the new features teased at Gamescom, including a new ship the Beluga liner, ship-launched fighters to protect your larger less combat-worthy ships (which you can choose to control or leave for the NPC to do so), passengers and passenger missions and more besides.

One of the new updates will be a much asked-for ship transfer option. The community voted on how they wanted that to work last week, choosing to let transfer take a little while to complete in a bid not to ruin immersion of the world Elite is set in. If you already have the PC exclusive beta access all you need to do is download the beta and select it from the launcher as you usually would. Otherwise you can get access by paying £6.99, provided you own Horizons already.

The next big update after this one (2.3) has already had some big details revealed at this stage, including a customisable avatar for our pilot and the long-awaited multi-crew option for ships that will allow us to travel with a friend.