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10 votes
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Why California is shutting down its last nuclear plant
8 votes -
Activision Blizzard settles with federal employment agency for $18 Million
14 votes -
Employees of Activision Blizzard file Unfair Labor Practice charge against the gaming company
8 votes -
Diablo IV game director out at Blizzard
7 votes -
Blizzard turned game developers into rock stars. Misbehavior followed
11 votes -
Activision Blizzard are being sued by their investors now
9 votes -
New leadership at Blizzard
16 votes -
How Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
15 votes -
Blizzard recruiters asked hacker if she ‘liked being penetrated’ at job fair
26 votes -
Activision Blizzard hires union-busting firm as workers start to come together
25 votes -
Inside Blizzard developers’ infamous Bill ‘Cosby Suite’
15 votes -
Activision Blizzard employees are walking out in protest
16 votes -
Blizzard botched Warcraft III remake after internal fights, pressure over costs
9 votes -
World of Warcraft players are hosting sit-in protests after Blizzard allegations
14 votes -
Activision Blizzard sued by California over ‘frat boy’ culture
36 votes -
Microsoft brought me back into their ecosystem with Game Pass
I'm primarily a PC gamer with a library slowly approaching 1,000 games on Steam. While I have sometimes bought games through the other storefronts like Blizzard, GOG, Uplay, and EA Origins, I...
I'm primarily a PC gamer with a library slowly approaching 1,000 games on Steam. While I have sometimes bought games through the other storefronts like Blizzard, GOG, Uplay, and EA Origins, I never really invested significant time in them to the point where I don't keep track of what is in those libraries. Suffice to say, I thought that I was so entrenched in Steam that I couldn't possibly play in another storefront for any meaningful amount of time.
This has changed for the past year. I hopped on one of those deals that gave me access to Game Pass since Microsoft added all the Bethesda games and partnered with EA Play. And I gotta say, I'm invested now. Invested so much that I bought a Series X despite having zero interest when the new generation of systems was announced. Game Pass on Xbox is an even better deal than Game Pass on PC. The library is larger and for the games that are Play Anywhere, I can continue my save file on my PC when my living room TV is unavailable.
I really think that Microsoft has a winning strategy with Game Pass this generation and it really surprised me how my attitude to the Xbox ecosystem changed this year. While I think both Sony and Nintendo have great exclusives, the value proposition for me of convenience and a rotating slate of quality games will likely keep me invested and subscribed, moreso than Xbox Gold or PS+ have in the past.
14 votes -
The inside story of Blizzard's departures and a company at a crossroads
7 votes -
Frost Giant enters pre-production on new RTS
3 votes -
BlizzCon 2021 announcements/trailers/etc
Figured I'd start putting together a thread as the flood of announcements and articles start coming out from this year's BlizzCon. The site, where you can pick which streaming "channel" to watch:...
Figured I'd start putting together a thread as the flood of announcements and articles start coming out from this year's BlizzCon.
The site, where you can pick which streaming "channel" to watch: https://blizzcon.com/
Full schedule: https://blizzcon.com/en-us/schedule
Opening ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyApQc-ZmSA
Diablo IV
- Blizzard on Diablo 4's Rogue and how PvP works within the open world
- Diablo IV: What's Next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO3LQqpiBvQ
Diablo II: Resurrected
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRP62MGOrUo
- Interview on Eurogamer: The big Diablo 2 Resurrected interview
- Some more details on Ars: Diablo II Resurrected tops BlizzCon announcement flurry
- Diablo II: Resurrected - Deep Dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE
World of Warcraft
- World of Warcraft Classic will be extended to include first expansion The Burning Crusade this year, along with paid character cloning and boosts, and "pre-nerf" raid bosses.
Overwatch 2
- Behind the Scenes of Overwatch 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRj-GotnNaQ
18 votes -
Diablo Swing Orchestra - Superhero Jagganath (2017)
7 votes -
The full schedule for BlizzCon 2021 has been released - Streaming free online on February 19-20
7 votes -
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion delayed until later this year
11 votes -
Mike Morhaime founds new games company, Dreamhaven
7 votes -
StarCraft II turns ten, gets a major map editor patch
10 votes -
Blizzard has suspended or closed over 74,000 accounts in the last month, as bots have upended the game's economy
9 votes -
World of Warcraft's game director Ion Hazzikostas on how the game's culture has evolved with the internet
6 votes -
Diablo IV - February 2020 quarterly update
9 votes -
Diablo terminal rendering engine
9 votes -
Blizzard's long history of manic pixie nightmare girls and fear of women
22 votes -
Warcraft III: Reforged - Developer update, including plans for upcoming changes and some concerns that will not be addressed
10 votes -
Overwatch Developer Update - Starting in March, "Hero Pools" will be introduced to competitive play, where different heroes will be disabled every week to encourage players to change strategies
7 votes -
Warcraft III: Reforged—the re-creation of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne—is now available worldwide
14 votes -
The team behind Warcraft III looks back at the game that birthed a genre, changed a franchise, and earned a Reforge-ing
5 votes -
Langjökull – Thirty-nine tourists got stuck for hours in a blizzard at an Icelandic glacier, but are now safe
4 votes -
A blizzard of “sustainability” labels
4 votes -
Diablo IV announced at Blizzcon 2019
11 votes -
BlizzCon 2019 opening ceremony
9 votes -
DeepMind's StarCraft II AI "AlphaStar" has reached the top-level Grandmaster league using multi-agent reinforcement learning
13 votes -
Blizzard confirms departure of veteran developers amid cancelled projects
27 votes -
Overwatch 2 to feature PvE, new map, at least one new hero
8 votes -
New search capabilities available: phrases, excluding terms, alternatives ("or")
On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search...
On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search function, and I've updated to using it now, so we have multiple nice new search capabilities available.
These should all be pretty familiar since a lot of other search systems and search engines have similar capabilities with the same syntax:
- As before, by default, searching for multiple words will be treated as "all of these terms". So if you search ~games for steam play, you'll get all topics that have both "steam" and "play" in them.
- Phrases can now be searched for by putting double quotes around them. Searching ~games for "steam play" in quotes will only find topics that specifically have "steam play".
- Excluding terms can be done by putting a minus sign in front of it. For example, if you wanted to try to find ~games posts about Blizzard and exclude the recent China controversy, you could search for blizzard -china.
- Alternatives can be searched for by using "or". This changes to "any of these terms" instead of "all of these terms". For example, searching for overwatch or diablo will find any topic with either of those terms, instead of both.
- These capabilities can be combined, so you can exclude phrases, use "or" with phrases, and so on. For example: blizzard -"hong kong" or diablo.
This all works both through the main site topic search (at the top of the sidebar) as well as the new search for your own topics/comments.
I'm going to write a page for the Docs with info about these capabilities, but I think I want to try to find a full specification of what's supported first to make sure I cover it properly. The PostgreSQL docs are pretty vague about it, so I'll probably need to take a look in the actual code.
Please let me know if you notice any issues with it, or if anything's confusing that I should make sure to document.
And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
52 votes -
UkDrillas announce intention to DDOS WoW Classic Servers
@ukdrillas: In roughly 20-30mins. Will attack every US PVP WoW server. Just setting up domain =)
12 votes -
Gnome mage "Jokerd" reaches level cap in World of Warcraft Classic in 3 days and 7 hours, in front of 350,000 viewers on Twitch
9 votes -
Worst weather experience?
Since it's the peak of tropical storm season again, this thread is open for all to share stories and thoughts about weather experiences. Not necessarily concerns about climate change, but the...
Since it's the peak of tropical storm season again, this thread is open for all to share stories and thoughts about weather experiences. Not necessarily concerns about climate change, but the incidents you've had personally, and whatever you've learned about preparation, resilience, and recovery.
I'm no longer a Florida resident, but my contacts are blowing up with concern over Hurricane Dorian.
I've been watching the storm on this nifty site, which has great tools and visualisations to satisfy the most avid weather geeks.
Dorian is likely to be another devastating, small-region, high-intensity buzzsaw, like last year's Hurricane Michael, which practically erased towns in the Florida panhandle, or the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. [I'm not really a good person - I'm having more than a little schadenfreude that Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is near the center of the storm's predicted path. But I'm not the only person who thought of that.]
According to the Insurance Information Institute, Florida has nearly $600 billion dollars of single family housing at risk from a Category 5 hurricane, leaving aside loss of life and injury.
My stories, compressed for those who've read this before
Some of my friends and colleagues have families still recovering from the impacts of 2017's Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria.
While I had to deal with these storms' impacts to infrastructure professionally, the hurricanes didn't have enormous personal impact. I was mainly supporting friends or covering for colleagues struggling to help family in Texas, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean Islands. Our house was eight miles from the coast, so we only dealt with a downed tree and other cleanup, a few hours without power, and some blocked roads.
Because I have dumb hobbies, the most extreme weather dangers I ever encountered were while kayaking and canoeing. Five years ago, I was on a guided ocean kayaking trip that ran into an unpredicted storm squall. Perfect blue skies and calm one minute; near darkness, huge waves, practically solid rain, and 40-knot winds the next. The party got scattered all over half a dozen of the 10,000 Islands. I struggled to get off the windward side of a long isle, so the wind banged my kayak into mangroves for an hour, then I was paddling furiously to avoid being swept into the Gulf of Mexico. But we all survived without major harm, the guide managed to reconnect us without calling for rescue, and we arrived at our destination with good stories. I can only imagine what it's like to be exposed to worse conditions in a hurricane.
Up to that time, the most dangerous weather I'd run into was snow and ice storms. When I was a kid, the Blizzard of 1978 left my family stranded, without phones, power or heat, for five days. We had a fireplace, plenty of hardwood, and an ample store of dried and canned provisions, so it felt more like a rustic adventure than the dire situation it could have been. My brother and I thought 10-foot snowdrifts were the greatest fun ever - we spent more time outside than in, "helping" to dig out by making snow forts and tunnels with the neighbors' kids. Of course, it was followed with a spring of chores like putting up half a kilometer of snow fences, learning to drive a 40-hp farm tractor, and setting up a ham radio antenna and generator, as my city-raised parents had come to grasp what rural life really entailed.
14 votes -
World of Warcraft Classic's game director Ion Hazzikostas reflects on the genesis of the idea, its challenging development, and the importance of a unified community
6 votes -
Activision Blizzard has moved billions of dollars of profit into tax havens and is under investigation by multiple international tax authorities
22 votes -
You can now play the original Diablo in a web browser
15 votes -
Overwatch - Sigma - Origin story (new hero, coming soon)
8 votes -
Frank Pearce (one of Blizzard's three founders) announces his departure from the company
18 votes