Games Corner: Januari 2014

World of Warcraft: Azeroth by the Numbers

From the rise of Onyxia to the fight for Pandaria, more than 100 million of you across the globe have visited Azeroth since the first realms went live in 2004. We’ve gathered some epic statistics to show what you’ve been up to all this time.

Curious about the faction breakdown among the 500 million characters you’ve created? Wonder how many instances your fellow adventurers run every day, or which pet is the most popular? Take a look at World of Warcraft’s first official infographic below for some fun and surprising never-before-seen facts about the game.

We hope everyone enjoys this glimpse at the inner workings of Azeroth—feel free to find and share it on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for being a part of World of Warcraft’s history, and here’s to new adventures with you in Warlords of Draenor!

If you'd like to view the infographic in a separate window, click here.

Patch 5.4.7 is now available for testing on the Public Test Realms (PTR). Participating on the Public Test Realms lets you test patches before it has been released.

If you'd like to help test and provide feedback, you can start by copying your character and downloading the PTR client. Once you've had a chance to try things out, be sure to visit our PTR Discussion forum to discuss the patch, and the PTR Bug Report forum to report any issues or errors.

PTR Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that the notes below are not final, and details may be subject to change before the release of patch 5.4.7.

Updated January 24

World of Warcraft Patch 5.4.7 PTR

Creatures

    Celestials now drop Season 15 Prideful Gladiator gear in place of Season 14 Grievous Gladiator gear.
    Rare spawns in Krasarang Wilds now award Honor Points only when they are defeated for the first time each day.


PvP

    Base Resilience for level-90 players is now 77% (up from 72%). Base Resilience for players below level 90 remain at 40%.
    Resilience Diminishing Returns curve for Resilience has been adjusted for the new base resilience value to maintain the same value per point of Resilience as previously.
    Battle Fatigue now reduces healing received while in PvP combat by 65% (up from 55%).


Battlegrounds and Arenas

    Arenas
        Dampening is now applied to an Arena match starting at the 5 minute mark (down from 10 minutes).
    Alterac Valley
        The following NPCs now have more health and deal more damage.
            Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth, Stormpike Defenders, Stormpike Bowman
            Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek'thar, Frostwolf Guardian, Frostwolf Bowman
        The following NPCs are now immune to disarm, daze, and Death Grip.
            Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth
            Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek'thar


Items

    The following items sold by Mistweaver Ai on the Timeless Isle have been raised to item level 489 (up from item level 476). This change is retroactive to all items that had been purchased previously.

Cloudscorcher Greatstaff
Contemplation of Shaohao
Daylight Protectorate
Featherdraw Longbow
Hozen Can Opener
Ordon Sacrificial Dagger
Pandaren Peace Offering
Scavenged Pandaren Dagger
Shield of the Eternal Noon
Yak-Herder's Longstaff

Valve have pulled the wraps off their new Dota 2 hero Terrorblade, a demon so badass that even Hells own personal, even worse hell, couldnt contain him (yes, this is actually his back story).

Hes got a bunch of abilities including the ability to make a double of an enemy target, create an magic of himself, and even do a health-swap with an foe target as his ultimate. That sounds kinda brutal, actually. I can look why he was able to escape DoubleHell.

Also revealed today was a new Random Ability Draft, which, as youd imagine, gives each players hero a set of completely random abilities. Take that, competitive play! Finally, Valve have also issued a bunch of balance changes, every of which you can check out here.

These updates are part of the New Bloom Festival, so if youre eager you should also check out the news from Day One.

Even if you dont pick to choose up Reaper of Souls, the first expansion, changes are coming to Diablo 3. Not only will launch day bring with it a major patch, itll also herald the retirement of the current Diablo 3 launcher that tiny thing that always seems to desire to patch just when youre in the mood to jump in speedily, because you never open at any other time.

The launcher will be replaced by the Battle.net desktop client, which also services World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2, and can be set to open at start up to ensure youve always got the latest updates when you desire to play, among other various benefits.

If you havent already made the switch, you can do so now, and profit in ahead of the hurry upon March 25. If youre keen upon Reaper of Souls its worthwhile doing so or loading up the launcher for a bit anyway; theres a 6GB pre-download you can profit out of the way now, making your launch day experience much smoother. Learned a few lessons have we, Blizz?

Valve has taken it on themselves to now permit Steam users the choice of cancelling any digital pre-orders they may happen to buy in their day-to-day business, a practice that was previously available only by emailing Steam withhold.

Users on Steam's Forums (via Polygon) are reporting the new change in policy, which can now be found in your Steam transaction history with the button "Refund an item" link for any pre-orders. This new change will enable players to change their mind at a whim, offering some sought after basics when it comes to pre-ordering online.

When it comes to pre-ordering upon Steam, Valve will charge your payment method the full amount, unlike brick 'n' mortar stores which go for the normal $5-$10 deposit upon physical media. It is currently unclear whether this new method will put the pre-order amount back into your Steam Wallet or refund it to your chosen payment method, though the choice is now there.

War. War never changes. Ha ha, Im just joshing you it changes every the time! it would be beautiful silly if it didnt because wed be forever stuck in stalemates, and also video games would be well boring. Happily, World of Tanks is really eager on being the opposite of boring, and has therefore introduced Confrontation mode.

What is Confrontation? Its basically the friendly of large-scale combat that another MMO might call realm-vs-realm or factional, only in this case the divisions are friendly of arbitrary, based only upon what nations vehicles youve elected to use. Well, actually, I guess thats nice of how we do it in the real world, but you choose your nation of residence based upon something more substantial than German tanks are so cool, I hope.

Confrontation is coming in update 8.11, which is due shortly. Tt will also deliver three new arenas: Windstorm, a brand new winter battle arena in a European setting, and new versions of existing maps Himmelsdorf and Ruinberg. The former is getting a winter makeover, while the latter will be gussied up with rainfall and fires, although presumably not at the same time, because the rain would put the blaze out. Bit anti-climactic, that.

Update: 8.11 test server now available, download client here if you don’t have it yet and install it in a new folder (not World_of_Tanks).

NVIDIA late last night rolled out another patch for their Geforce Experience software, bringing the much vaunted all-in-one optimisation, streaming and recording program to version 1.8.2. The latest update mostly adds fixes for the GameStream and Shadowplay services, although there are a few bug fixes as well. The entire patch notes, courtesy of the NVIDIA website, are below:

Bug Fixes

Fixes “Installation is corrupt” bug when attempting to install a new driver
Fixes incorrect reporting of the PC’s monitor resolution
Fixes an issue where log files consume excessive disk space over time

ShadowPlay

Adds option to change the directory of the ShadowPlay buffer
Fixes missing audio when playing in 5.1 surround mode
Adds 30 FPS recording option
Adds custom bit rate control
Adds output resolution control
Adds microphone on push function

GameStream

Improved streaming stability and quality of service

The push-to-talk microphone feature is probably the most requested feature by fans on the Geforce Forums, while the ability to record in 30 FPS will please YouTube Let’s Players, given the limitations imposed by the video service hub.

Nvidia’s GTX 780 Ti graphics card reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown from AMD two months ago, and it seems that the parallel processing giant is prepping to defend its title with the impending launch of the GeForce GTX Titan Black Edition, and dual-GPU GeForce GTX 790. According to a report over at VideoCardz, the updated Titan will contain the same GPU as found in the GTX 780, but sport more FP64 CUDA cores, double the GDDR5 memory to 6GB, 2,880 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The Titan is expected to ship next month, and clock in at around USD$1,000. VideoCardz could only speculate [pun intended] at the specs for the GTX 790, but believes that the card will ship in March for USD$1,000.

Most MMORPGs generally attempt to avoid ESRB ratings of Mature and above, simply because of the audience limitations this creates. Bethesda have had to deal with just such a situation today, after The Elder Scrolls Online was hit with a Mature rating, but the company says they wont be changing all.

“While we may disagree with the ESRB’s determination, we do not plan to challenge the rating, and we are unwilling to change the game’s content to achieve a different rating,” says Bethesda. “The game we have created is the one we want our fans to be able to play.”

“As a result of the ESRB rating, we are in the process of promptly updating everything with the required rating and age gates, including game trailers, web sites, and ads. Thanks for your understanding. We can’t wait to welcome players into The Elder Scrolls Online soon.”

The Mature rating relates to Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol and Violence.
The Elder Scrolls Online launches on April 4.

The first release of the SteamOS beta came with a dire warning: dont install this unless you want to wipe your difficult drive tidy. Now theres no need to be afeared of such things, with a new ISO uploaded from Valve that should -- fingers crossed -- permit you to dual boot.

“Dual-boot and custom partitioning are now possible from the ‘Expert Install’ option,” writes Valve in a new post.

“PLEASE note there has been very little testing on this, especially any kind of dual-boot setup. So don’t install it on any machine you are not prepared to lose.”
You have been warned.

Blizzard are offering further free server migrations as they work to centralise the population of their World of Warcraft players.
Players on Area 52 and Stormrage may move to Turalyon, while players on Tichondrius and Illidan may move to Blackrock, and players on Bleeding Hollow or Darkspear can head to Korgath.
More details and instructions on how to get all this happening are available at this Battle.net post.

ArenaNet yesterday released their first living world update for Guild Wars 2 in 2014: The Origins of Madness. Arch-villain Scarlet Briar is your new enemy this time around, and ArenaNet are promising massive battles and shocking revelations.

Theres also a trailer. Well leave it up to you to decide how shocking it is.

Wargaming.net have proudly trumpeted their latest milestone: a new player record of 1,114,000 gamers playing concurrently.

The record took area on January 19 on the Russian cluster, where Wargaming says that the overall number of daily users has long since surpassed several million, but the peak concurrent player count has been hovering around 900,000 gamers for the past few months.

"Finally, weve breached the one million mark."

Wargaming finished off their press release by promising us that they had considerable improvements planned for World of Tanks in 2014.

Source : games.on.net

Capcom have announced that Steam will soon play host to a remastered, Ultimate HD Edition of Resident Evil 4, launching upon February 28.

The press releases promises that the game will run in the highest visual fidelity ever with startling HD running at a serene 60 frames per second.

You can pre-order it now upon Steam, which will also net you a 60-track digital OST and an art book. It will include achievements, as well as cloud saves, trading cards, controller withhold and global leaderboards

As has been expected since the announcement at last year's return to their annual Blizzcon event, Blizzard's free-to-play card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has now gone into Open Beta, allowing anyone to join in upon the action.

With the last gigantic update that Blizzard expects to see now behind us, players joining in or those continuing their card-life adventures will locate only little tweaks and changes during the Open Beta phase, essentially meaning that what we have now won't be changing for awhile. This also means that the team expect no more wipes to occur, so don't be alarmed that your shining Illidan will be disappearing in the next patch.

As open beta is still a beta phase, we will be closely monitoring many aspects of the game to ensure a positive play experience for everyone. Please be aware that if smoke starts curling out of our servers due to unexpectedly high demand to play Hearthstone, we may have to temporarily disable open beta account activations for a time until we’re ready to take on more players.

Currently the Open Beta is available just to North American folk (which includes us Oceanic players) however Blizzard has stated that they are rolling out access over the next few days so don't panic.

To hop into the game, simply head to the official site and download the Battle.net launcher, where you'll locate access to Hearthstone automatically granted. See you in-game!

Here you'll find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to the recently released World of Warcraft patch 5.4: Siege of Orgrimmar. Hotfixes are updates we make on our end without requiring you to download a new patch. Some of the hotfixes below take effect the moment they were implemented, while others may require your realm to be restarted to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch update. We will continue to update this list as additional hotfixes are applied.

5.4.2 hotfixes have been listed by the date they've been implemented or as a compiled list by category.

5.4 Patch Information

    Siege of Orgrimmar: Feature Overview
    5.4 Patch Notes
    5.4 and 5.4.1 Hotfixes
    5.4 Known Issues
    Technical Support & Troubleshooting

Games Corner

World of Warcraft: Azeroth by the Numbers

WoW : Patch 5.4.7 is now available for testing on the Public Test Realms (PTR)

Dota 2 update adds new hero Terrorblade, new random abilities mode

Diablo 3 launcher to be folded into Battle.net desktop client

Steam now allowing refunds for pre-orders

World of Tanks update 8.11 to add long-awaited Confrontation mode

Geforce Experience updated to 1.8.2, more Shadowplay features added

Nvidia preps GTX Titan Black Edition and GTX 790

The Elder Scrolls Online given "Mature" rating, Bethesda unwilling to change content

SteamOS beta now allows dual-booting: no need to format your hard drive

World of Warcraft : free character migrations now available

Guild Wars 2 launches the "Origins of Madness" living world update

World of Tanks breaks the one million concurrent player mark

Resident Evil 4 “Ultimate HD Edition” will coming soon to Steam

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Reveals its Hand in Open Beta!

World Of Warcraft : 5.4.2 Hotfixes: January 21

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