Author: Trafficblast

Last week, Respawn Entertainment announced continued plans to deal with Apex Legends cheaters but didn’t specify what those plans were. While the California-based studio still isn’t sharing any specifics, so as to avoid helping cheaters cheat, Respawn is finally prepared to talk a little about what’s happening behind the scenes. That includes bans being handed out to a quarter of a million players.

Respawn’s executive producer, Drew McCoy, penned another blog post about what’s happening to cheaters in EA’s battle royale. “We can’t share details on what we’re doing so as to not give a head’s up to the cheat makers,” McCoy writes. “But what we can say is that we’re attacking this from every angle: from improvements in detecting cheaters, to bolstering resources and tools, to improving processes and other sneaky things to combat sellers and cheaters.”

According to McCoy, Respawn has shared “some high-level stats” on the progress thus far. You can read the full statistics below.

• The recently added in-game reporting tool has had a big impact on discovering new cheats, including previously undetectable cheats that are now being found automatically via EAC
• Total bans are now at 770K players
• We have blocked over 300K account creations
• We have banned over 4,000 cheat seller accounts (spammers) in the last 20 days
• Total matches on PC impacted by cheaters or spammers has been reduced by over half in the last month due to recent efforts.

“It is a constant war with the cheat makers that we will continue to fight,” McCoy says. “We take cheating in Apex Legends incredibly seriously and have a large amount of resources tackling it from a variety of angles.” McCoy hasn’t specified when Respawn will outline plans to deal with cheaters, but he did confirm that he’ll “be back next week with an update on another one of the issues called out in last week’s post.”

In other news, Respawn confirmed that all Titanfall projects have been tabled so that the company can focus on Apex Legends and Star Wars – Jedi: Fallen Order. In focusing on Apex Legends, Respawn has stated that the game’s Season 2 plans will be outlined at this year’s EA Play event just before E3 in June. Some of the suggested changes coming to Season 2 of Apex Legends are new characters, items, weapons, and alterations to the map.

Game of Thrones Season 8 finally reached its much-anticipated third episode “The Long Night” last weekend, and gave us the epic Battle of Winterfell. While the episode caused a mixed response amongst fans and critics, it delivered a number of dramatic moments as the forces of the living took on the Night King and the White Walkers. Now showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have made an intriguing comment about the remaining episodes. Warning, major spoilers ahead!

Fans will know that in the episode, Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) killed the Night King, ending the war against the White Walkers. There was no suggestion in the show that he wasn’t dead–he shattered into glass and his army was destroyed. However, when Benioff and Weiss were asked on Jimmy Kimmel Live if that was the last we are to see of White Walkers, they gave a particularly cryptic answer.

“Yeah, we’re not going to answer that,” Benioff told Kimmel. Which certainly isn’t the conclusive reply you might expect. Of course, they could just be playing it safe and simply refusing to say anything about the episodes that are left. However, bearing in mind the Night King’s supernatural powers and his own ability to raise the dead, perhaps we will actually see the White Walkers again. Remember, there are still three very long episodes of the show to go.

“The Long Night” smashed previous Game of Thrones viewing figures, delivering 17.8 million viewers. This figure includes replays and streaming; in terms of on-air viewing, the episode drew an audience of 12 million across two airings on Sunday night. The previous record was held by Episode 1 of Season 8, which was watched by a total of 17.4 million viewers earlier this month.

For more on the latest episode of Game of Thrones, check out our look at the Night King’s true goal, what happened to Rhaegal and Ghost, and all the Easter Eggs and references you probably missed.

The popular competitive esport Rocket League has become the latest victim of review bombing, following news that developer Psyonix is being acquired by Epic Games. Concerns that the acquisition would mean the game will be pulled from Steam led to a flurry of negative reviews on the platform, before Steam’s new anti-bombing tool was deployed to stop it.

Steam reviews recently dipped from “Very Positive” down to “Mixed.” That prompted Steam to implement its tool that excludes periods of “off-topic review activity” from the aggregate score. The negative reviews are still visible, and they almost universally reference the Epic acquisition, but they’re no longer counted in the average.

Concerns about the game’s exclusivity stemmed from a statement (via The Verge) that mentioned the game will be coming to the Epic Games Store later this year. It said “in the meantime” it will still be available for purchase on Steam, and that “thereafter” it will continue to be supported–reportedly through the release of patches and DLC.

That gave the impression that once it appears on the Epic Store it will be pulled from the Steam storefront, though no formal announcement has been made. The official Rocket League Twitter account issued a vague statement that stresses the game “remains available on Steam” and that current players can “look forward to continued support,” but didn’t necessarily rule out pulling it off the store at some future date.

Epic Games has made a habit of securing exclusives on its emerging Steam competitor, even recently issuing an ultimatum to Steam aimed at improving developer revenue splits. This has led to similar controversies over games like Metro Exodus and The Division 2–but in both of those cases, the switch was formally announced, rather than inferred by fans.

Though Valve has expressed its dissatisfaction with Epic’s aggressive moves against its store, it has been stopping users from review-bombing over the rivalry. This is the second high-profile case of the tool being implemented in the last month, the first being when Valve stopped the review-bombing against several past Borderlands games upon news that Borderlands 3 will be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store.

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