blizzard

Over the course of a forum post on Battle.net, Blizzard outlined its policy on cheating in Overwatch, and placed a notable emphasis on the fact that players should play fair; play nice or suffer the consequences...

"If a player is found to be cheating — €”or using hacks, bots, or third-party software that provides any sort of unfair advantage — €”that player will be permanently banned from the game. Full stop," the company said. "Not only does cheating undermine the spirit of fair play that all of our products are based on, but it works to diminish the fun and enjoyment of others. While we are unlikely to publicly acknowledge when accounts are closed as a result of cheating or using unauthorized programs, we have and will continue to monitorOverwatch for exploitative behavior, as well as take action as needed to preserve the integrity of game."

Blizzard was quick to note that they will actively seek to verify accusations of cheating through the most reliable means possible:

"It's important to note that while video evidence from killcams, Plays of the Game, Highlights, and other community captured footage can be very helpful, we will never use it alone to verify whether or not cheating is taking place," Blizzard said. "As a result, we encourage players to play nice, play fair and avoid publicly accusing individuals of cheating whenever possible and instead use the reporting methods detailed above."

Assistant game director Ion Hazzikostas responded to a forum thread about expensive vendor items, and actively tried to dismantle the widespread belief that there exists a feeling of consensus in a world as massive and diversified as WoW's. He wrote:

"If I’d instead posted that we were going to reconsider and massively reduce the prices of the cosmetic items on this vendor, there would be other people feeling like their feedback was ignored.

It’s exceptionally rare that everyone wants the same thing,” he added. “And even then, there is a large silent majority that does not post on forums. If there were actual unanimity regarding a certain issue, we would change our design: For example, early on in Warlords, we changed Group Finder loot from Personal back to Need/Greed until we could iterate on Personal loot further, and the community overwhelmingly told us that was a dumb idea. The change was reverted within 2 days.”

He wrapped up his response by honing in on the value of tailoring different kinds of content to different groups, as opposed to just issuing one 'low common denominator' that lacks any real excitement, for anyone.

“If an awesome mount comes exclusively from PvP, the majority of players who don’t participate in PvP yet desire the mount would prefer that it were otherwise,” Hazzikostas explained. “If our goal were to please a majority, we would likely have to make a version of that mount also available through raiding, and one also available through outdoor questing and reputation, at the very least. But doing that would dilute the reward itself. Ultimately, the approach we take is usually to tailor different content and rewards that can feel special to different groups, rather than trying to come up with a lowest common denominator that isn’t special to anyone.”

In case you've lived underneath a rock for most your life, Leeroy Jenkins is the name of a WoW character who famously screamed out his name before charging into battle in a blazing display of unabashed recklessness, only to end up getting his entire team killed in epically ignorant fashion. 

Blizzard stepped up and recognized Leeroy's fabled shamelessness several times by rewarding him an official trading card, mini figurine, and even named an achievement after him. See below.







Who might be the man behind this storied moment in WoW gaming history? Meet Ben Schulz, a Denver-based gamer who initially filmed the video with some buddies from college, never thinking it'd go anywhere. Oh, if only you'd known Schulz, if only. After the video had been online for a couple years, Schulz was formally invited to give the keynote speech at ROFLCon (been invited to speak at for three years now). Check out Schulz speaking at Blizzcon below:



Jenkins continues to find his way into various pop culture moments, even truck advertisements. Check out four such instances below. You've probably, definitely seen at least one of 'em before.









And of course, perhaps the pinnacle of Leeroy's widespread fame thus far--The Daily Show mention...Oh Leeroy, we love ya man.

On Thursday when the Overwatch beta dropped, the Overwatch searches back over on Pornhub instantaneously surged by 817%. People were stoked, needed to blow off some steam, I guess. 


Via: venturebeat

The company went on to find that 'Tracer' was the most popular search term, amidst the beta release frenzy. Here are some of the other widely searched terms:


Via: venturebeat

Time to buy a dang lotto ticket.

They posted the following series of announcements to their Facebook page on what we can expect as potential developments for Nostalrius server over upcoming days:

Dear community,

The last few weeks have been full of exciting events that we did not anticipate. We saw the first official answer from J. Allen Brack on the topic of legacy servers, the petition reached 250.000 signatures, and we are currently scheduling a meeting at Blizzard campus!

We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions.

Since these events are major changes regarding the legacy server scene, completely changing our former strategy, we have several announcements today:

A. Ambassadors of Legacy servers

After the answer from Blizzard and the amazing support we received, we feel we are now not only the admins of a private server: We are also the ambassadors of a larger movement for the entire World of Warcraft community that wants to see game history restored. It is a major responsibility. Our top-priority and only focus now is to fulfill the needs of this community, by carrying your voice to Blizzard directly.

B. Nostalrius source code and database won’t be released

We acknowledge the help that the emulation community provided to us by creating MaNGOS and our initial objective was to release part of these sources to help improve the current emulators - without our special anti-cheat and some other critical features.

Our custom anticheat had unique functionalities that allowed us to detect and track any kind of hack / bot in a generic way. We believe the anticheat that we made was able to detect and was able to block all of the known threats, and releasing our code would allow the development of more powerful cheating tools that would be more difficult, if not impossible, to detect. We have spent countless hours to fight people making money from exploits, cheats and traffics: the last thing we want to see now is people getting more money from wow hacks because of us.

Some voices in the emulation scene wanted to legally force us to release the complete source code if we chose to only publish a part of it. As explained above, the anticheat is not something we would reveal in any case.

A second important point is that keeping the sources private could be useful at some point during the discussion with Blizzard. They proposed to discuss together and we want to have all the chances on our side, for the community we represent now.

Furthermore, if official legacy servers were to be released at some point in the future, the emulation would become, in essence, obsolete for our community.

 

C. A special gift for you

On a side note, the development team has prepared a gift for you. One of the hidden Nostalrius features was the ability to "replay" sequences of the game. This is something that was mainly used to create our videos, but never released to players. We accumulated a few replays of different events that occurred on our PvP and PvE servers, and we are willing to let you replay these magic moments. We are glad to inform you that Nostalrius team is releasing the first "replay" feature for World of Warcraft, and will be available to anyone: a powerful tool for future e-sport event maybe ?

The source code is available here (based on BunnyEmu, credit to their developers) :

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