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Mikepjbell

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Posts posted by Mikepjbell

  1. I'm so very far behind on this game and need a really short and brief bullet list of what's changed and what's coming since I stopped playing 2 or 3 months ago!!

     

    Sorry for my ignorance! Can anyone help there? 

  2. Calendar.ico

     

    Lee and I have been chatting about how we manage the calendar events and the best way to make sure we get events up and online on a regular basis at a time when people know to look.

     

    It has been decided that each Sunday evening, a standard set of events for various games will be posted on the calendar for the following week, meaning that everyone in the clan will know that on Sunday night / Monday morning, the list is updated and they can sign up for events they're interested in.

     

    We'll trial this for a bit and see how it goes, but I think we all realise that as of late it has been difficult to manage and keep updated frequently. If we do it in one go it should be somewhat easier to manage.

     

    Don't forget however that it's up to the many and not the few (especially the Champions) to manage this so any input or event booking support is very much appreciated!

     

    Please let me know your thoughts if you can think of a better way of managing the same - thanks!

     

    N.B - I'll book a few events for the remainder of this week to get things started :)

     

    Mike.

     

     

  3. k9lx0tzxuwogmsedbcje.jpg

     

    Bungie Explains How It's Speeding Up Destiny 2 PvP

    By Kirk Hamilton on 02 Feb 2018 at 7:30AM

    One of the most pervasive complaints among those who play a lot of competitive Destiny 2 is that the game is too slow. Players don’t move around fast enough, and it takes too long to defeat an opposing player. It sounds like that’s going to change.

    Today on the ol’ Bungie blog, design lead Josh Hamrick explained some of the changes to the game’s “sandbox” that are currently in the works. The changes he listed focus largely on increasing movement speed, buffing weapons, and speeding up cooldowns.

    The term sandbox relates to the overall balance of weapons and abilities in the game. Destiny 2's sandbox has come under sharp criticism from players over the past few months, yet has remained largely unchanged since Destiny 2 first launched last September.

    “Our goals for this round are to provide individual players with more hero moments by increasing overall speed and mobility, increasing the amount of supers you charge to demolish your enemies, and increasing the frequency and impact of our most montage worthy power weapons, especially in the Crucible,” wrote Hamrick.

    Hamrick detailed the following changes (which will also affect PvE), saying that they’re part of a game update that’ll arrive in “the next few months.” He prefaced the list by saying that the changes aren’t all guaranteed to make it into the game, but that “the outlook is good at this point.”

    ∙All three glides plus Catapult and Strafe Lift have been re-tuned and buffed to make them more unique and faster.

    The mobility stat has had its range expanded and been completely re-tuned as well. In short, everyone gets faster and the high end is higher.

    The players’ ground speed cap has been increased, allowing for faster total movement speed, regardless of how you may get there.

    Arcstrider, Sentinel, and Striker all move faster, and at the same speed as one another, while in their Supers.

    Arcstrider, as a whole, is performing well in PvP but mostly due to its neutral game perks. We’ve made the following changes in an effort to get the Super to be a more competitive option:

    - Faster Attack Animations.

    - Faster Dodge Animations.

    - Increased range of all attacks.

    Supers recharge faster for everyone!

    We’ve buffed several weapon archetypes (including, but not limited to, Hand Cannons, Pulse Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and Shotguns) and a few specific perks, as well.

    - A key goal here is to make Shotguns, Snipers, and Fusion rifles more prevalent in the game.

    We’ve also been working side-by-side with our friends on PvP to increase the pace of PvP combat and the frequency of power play. Here’s a sneak peek at their hard work:

    - Player respawn times for all Quickplay modes have been decreased.

    - Power Ammo respawn timers for all Quickplay modes have been reduced 30%.

    - Power Ammo respawn timers in Survival have been reduced 40%.

    - Power Ammo respawn timers in Countdown have been reduced 25%.

    - Ammo counts have been adjusted in relation to these timers, and in relation to weapon type.

    - Enemy players now drop their power ammo on death. The dropped brick is available to anyone until picked up or 30 seconds have passed.

    He closed by noting that the Titan shoulder charge was being reverted to how it worked before its recent distance nerf, explaining the reasoning behind the nerf while acknowledging that it didn’t work out how they wanted.

    Quick take on this: These changes all sound aimed at bringing things closer to the faster-paced, more deadly Crucible of Destiny 1. That should make a lot of players happy, though I say that as someone who doesn’t actually hate Destiny 2's overall PvP philosophy and weapon balance. It remains to be seen how all those changes will work in practise, of course, but I could see a more ability-focused, faster-paced, more deadly D2 Crucible being plenty of fun. As with many of the changes Bungie has announced will be coming over the next year, only time will tell.

    Furthermore, beyond any one specific change, it is nice as ever to watch Bungie continue to open up and share more information with players. You can find the rest of the Destiny 2 weekly update over at the Bungie blog

  4. Very interesting read:

     

    BioWare Doubles Down On Anthem As Pressure Mounts

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    Over the past few months, BioWare has essentially transformed into a single-game studio as it harnesses its teams to work on the ambitious multiplayer action game Anthem, sources say. There are still small teams maintaining Star Wars: The Old Republic and piecing together the next Dragon Age, which was recently rebooted, but the bulk of BioWare’s staff in both Edmonton and Austin are now on Anthem. And there’s a sense among BioWare employees that the company’s future is inextricably tied to this game.

    Anthem, which was announced at E3 2017, is now scheduled for release in early 2019, according to three people familiar with the project. The “fall 2018” window mentioned during that E3 announcement was “never realistic,” one source said. Exact dates remain in flux—and Anthem’s developers must also plan for a beta release, an EA Access launch, and an ongoing schedule of patches and updates—but it appears unlikely to developers that publisher EA will allow BioWare to delay the game any further than March 2019, when the company’s 2019 fiscal year comes to an end. (EA, like most publicly traded companies, uses the fiscal calendar as a basis for all of its decisions, as those dates determine how investors will behave.)

    BioWare, founded in 1995, has long been seen as one of the world’s most prestigious developers of role-playing games, thanks to hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Mass Effect trilogy, and Dragon Age Origins. In 2007, EA purchased the studio, expanding it beyond its original office in Edmonton and putting BioWare studios in Austin, Montreal, and Virginia. (The latter two were later shut down.)

    It’s not unusual for BioWare to pull staff from other projects as it enters the final year of production on a game. In recent years, BioWare has done the same for both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition. But Anthem, the studio’s first new franchise in eight years and EA’s first big stab at a Destiny-style persistent online world, feels different. To BioWare staff, the stakes feel higher than they ever have. As one developer told me, there’s a belief that if Anthem doesn’t live up to EA’s expectations, BioWare will look very different in the future, especially after the disappointment of Mass Effect Andromeda led to EA absorbing BioWare Montreal into the studio EA Motive.

    Now, with a year left in development and a climate that’s grown more turbulent thanks to controversies over EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II and Activision’s Destiny 2, pressure is mounting for Anthem to be great. In the past few weeks I’ve spoken to more than half a dozen people close to the project, all of whom spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to talk about the game, and they’ve described feeling both optimistic and anxious—optimistic that they can make something good, but anxious at the number of forces that appear to be pushing against them.

     

    Anthem has been in development since 2012, at first under Mass Effect director Casey Hudson, who left the company in 2014 (and returned last year to lead BioWare as studio head). The game remained in preproduction at BioWare’s lead Edmonton studio for a very long time. Some close to the Anthem team have criticized that fact, suggesting that the game’s development was floundering, but veteran Anthem staff point out that most big new franchises have long gestation periods. Destiny, most notably, was in preproduction for years as the developers at Bungie tried to figure out what a persistent multiplayer shooter might look like. At points during 2014 and 2015, I heard several rumors that the Anthem project was not going well, in part because of the long-running issues that BioWare has faced with its engine, Frostbite, and in part because making a game of this nature can be an excruciating process.

    Over the last year, as Anthem’s production ramped up and BioWare began putting more and more of its staff on the project, things appear to have improved. When I asked one source recently whether Anthem’s strugglesfell more into the category of “this game is screwed” or “game development is really hard,” the source said that over time, it had veered from the former into the latter. Other people close to BioWare have said similar things, although it’s not hard to find developers willing to complain about Frostbite, the game engine initially designed for EA’s Battlefield games, which has impeded many of BioWare’s projects over the past decade.

     

    The past year has been tumultuous for BioWare and involved some major changes to the studio. One was to reboot the fourth Dragon Age, which at the time was code-named Joplin, according to two sources. (There’s a running theme here—Anthem’s codename was Dylan.) The goal, those sources said, was to implement more “live” elements into the game, although two of those sources stressed that this next Dragon Age will still have a heavy focus on characters and story, whenever it does come out. It’s not clear what a “live” version of Dragon Age might look like, but EA has been public about its embrace of games as a service, and its lack of interest in releasing $60 games that do not have any sort of revenue tail, whether that means paid extra content, microtransactions, or something else.

     

    UPDATE (1/25, 9:50am): The day following the publication of this article, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson confirmed that the next Dragon Agewill indeed be a live game. “Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you’ll be relieved to see what the team is working on,” he wrote on Twitter. “Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about ‘live’ it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story.”

    Original article follows:

    BioWare has also discussed ending development on the multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, those sources said, although one person familiar with the studio told me recently that plans are still up in the air.

     

    What’s clear is that both BioWare studios, Edmonton and Austin, are singularly focused on Anthem, and will be until that game comes out. Even Mark Darrah, executive producer and shepherd of the Dragon Agefranchise, was recently moved to Anthem. In June, shortly after Anthem’s reveal, Darrah tweeted that he was not working on the game. But things have changed. This morning, minutes after we heard back from an EA spokesperson saying the publisher was declining to comment on this article, Darrah tweeted that he is working on both Anthem and Dragon Age—his apparent first public acknowledgement that he is now on Anthem. “Anthem’s up next but there are people hard at work on both franchises and I look forward to sharing more in the future,” he said. The creative director of the Dragon Age series, Mike Laidlaw, left BioWare last year.

    Even with both of BioWare’s studios all-in on Anthem, some developers have expressed anxieties, in large part because of 2017’s other events. First there was Mass Effect Andromeda, a high-profile failure that disappointed fans last spring and led to the closure of BioWare Montreal, as well as Mass Effect getting put on ice. Veteran members of the Anthemteam were thrilled to finally unveil the game at E3 in June 2017, but a month later, BioWare studio head Aaryn Flynn departed, to be replaced by Casey Hudson. Both men are well-respected at the company, but this sort of top executive shuffling often leads to worry.

    Then, in November 2017, widespread player anger over loot boxes and microtransactions in EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II shook up the entire video game industry. From what I’ve heard, the loot box controversy has led a number of big video game studios, including BioWare, to reexamine their plans for microtransactions in future games. Although Anthem’s microtransaction plans are still undecided (and, I hear, may only involve cosmetics), the outrage has left some developers on edge.

     

    Most recently, sources say, Anthem’s developers have been watching the ongoing anger in the Destiny 2 community over the state of that game. Destiny fans have grown irritated at Destiny 2’s lack of content, Bungie’s poor communication, and the lingering feeling that Destiny 2 is repeating its predecessor’s mistakes. Although fans and pundits have suggested that Destiny 2’s inability to capture hardcore players may leave an opening for Anthem to grab that crowd, some BioWare developers have expressed worry that their game will face its own growing pains, as all games of this nature do. Most persistent action games have had to recover from rocky launches, including Destiny, Diablo III, and The Division. The question is: how much patience will EA have for Anthem?

    And then there’s the toxicity problem, as video game pundits seize any opportunity to stoke anger at big publishers. Two people who have worked on Anthem both expressed anxiety to me about the ways some big YouTubers have spread misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric about EA, saying that it has a demoralizing effect on those people on the ground level. To people who work for EA, the publisher isn’t just a cold corporate master—it is a complicated machine that, yes, is concerned first and foremost with generating revenue for investors, but also supports thousands of people in many tangible and intangible ways. People close to BioWare, along with many other developers I’ve talked to in recent months, worry that commentary from some of YouTube’s loudest voices has eliminated nuance and made companies like EA seem like Disney villains.

    If you’re a BioWare fan, there are certainly reasons to be hopeful. Anthem’s staff have shown a willingness to be transparent and engage with fans, as technical design director Brenon Holmes posts frequently on Reddit to answer questions and share details on the game. What we’ve seen of the game has looked spectacular, even if last year’s footage seems a little too pretty to be real. One thing is undeniable, however: For BioWare, the pressure is on.

  5. Heh... good start...

     

    anthem.0.png

     

    While denying an earlier report that development is behind schedule, Electronic Arts told The Wall Street Journal that Anthem, the open-world, multiplayer action game coming from BioWare, will launch in 2019 and not 2018, the window originally given for the game at E3 2017.

    Instead, EA will launch a new Battlefield game. Blake Jorgensen, Electronic Arts’ chief financial officer, told the Journal that the publisher figured Anthem would do better if it launched in a quieter period than the traditional end-of-the-year crush of big titles.

  6. rl_generic_screen_5_18_1920x1080.c6e1dc5

     

    I just wanted to update you all on updates coming to Rocket League in Early 2018.

     

    I took a bit of a break from Rocket League when joining FG, but I'm picking it back up now as the dedicated champion and I'm hoping some of you can enjoy it with me, and indeed the new features coming which are listed below.

     

    Some notable updates to me are:

    - Tournaments sounds bloody good fun and it's be good to get 2v2 and 3v3 teams together for that!

    - Team quick-chat only sounds helpful. I can't count the amount of times when I've wanted to type something just to my team.

     

    Quote


    FEBRUARY

     

    February Content Update

    • Competitive Season 7 Begins
    • Competitive Season 6 Rewards
    • New Crate
    • New RLCS Fan Rewards

     

    Tournaments Beta

    • Steam public beta for our upcoming Tournaments Feature

     

    MARCH

    • New Licensed Premium DLC
    • Spring Event

     

    Tournaments-Logo-Final-Black.jpg

     

    SPRING (MARCH-APRIL)
    Spring Feature Update:

     

    Tournaments

    • Play against other players in bracketed, single elimination tournaments

     

    Quality of Life Updates

    • Item Stacking
    • Better Item Filtering, Searching, and Sorting
    • Equip to Blue/Orange Team for Painted Car Bodies
    • New and Expanded Options
    •     Packet Send/Receive Rate and Bandwidth Limits
    •     “Team Quick Chat Only”
    •     Disable “One Minute Remaining”, etc. messages

     

    Connection Quality Info

    • See notifications for Packet Loss, Latency Variance, and Server Performance in-game
    • Will help us and the community better differentiate between “server issues” and connection problems

     

     

    APRIL AND BEYOND
    Once we’re past the Tournaments release we’ll begin talking more about our roadmap for the summer and beyond with posts like these every few months. As a quick reminder, here are some of the features that are still being developed for 2018 release:

     

    Cross-Platform Parties

    • Party up and matchmake with players from other (participating) platforms

     

    Progression Updates

    • Make XP relevant again
    • Earn Decryptors through play
    • New Banners, Titles, and other rewards for reaching high levels

     

    New Arenas

     

    New Features

     

    Xbox One X - We are now targeting Xbox One X support for late 2018

     

    That’s just a quick look at the major highlights that are coming up this year, and look out for the February Update next week (pending first-party certification approvals) when it launches on all platforms February 7.

     

     

  7. I'm rather hoping that as a clan we jump back on this game. Maybe a little naive but, here's to hoping.

     

    The thing I most enjoyed was the time we spent trying to do the raid and crubical matches, and just generally messing around with the likes of @Diddums @Amnotright @GazzaGarratt @Misneach_ and everyone else.

     

    I felt we had more fun with Destiny 2 than we do with the likes of Overwatch. It was less intense and generally very funny and my hope is that as a community we can give it another go in the next couple of months.

     

    It's good to be sweaty try-hard on Overwatch and by all means Overwatch is a brilliant, brilliant game. I just think we need to also balance it out with silly shit in games like Destiny 2. It's fun when we all work as a team to try and beat a game, and fail absolutely fucking miserably, but in doing so nearly piss ourselves laughing.

     

    I'm going to get back on this game. Around Feb / March there will be more content and I think more fun to be had as a clan, if we're up for it.

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