One of the biggest games in the world has been unplayable since this afternoon. Ahead of its next season — or possible a completely new chapter — Fortnite has gone down in just about every way imaginable. It’s widely believed that when the game is back up and running it will be a rebooted version featuring a brand new map.
Source: Fortnite has been down for hours as millions of players stare at a black hole – The Verge
The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player’s hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity).
Source: Cheating allegations against poker player Mike Postle halt livestreamed games
“In this paper specifically, we have tried to predict the [ranking] of the player in the ultimate survival test,” the project’s contributors wrote in a preprint paper (“Survival of the Fittest in PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds“) published on Arxiv.org. “We have applied multiple machine learning models to find the optimum prediction.”
Source: AI predicts PUBG player placement from stats and rankings | VentureBeat
The CoH Survivors Facebook page has absolutely exploded in fury and hurt over the news. While some folks are feeling vindicated because their previous claims about the secret server have been proven true, others are concerned that the publicity will bring a(nother) NCsoft C&D down on the operators’ heads.
Every major sport in the US has seen the average age of its viewership increase since 2000. The NBA’s average fan is 42. The average NFL fan is 50. The average MLB fan is 57. What’s more, these audiences are limited almost entirely to North America. The Overwatch League, meanwhile, will begin with nine US teams and three from abroad—Shanghai, Seoul, and London (with more, I’m told, on the way)—and its average fan is a demographically pleasing 21 years old.
Source: The Overwatch Videogame League Aims to Become the New NFL | WIRED
But in Engare’s case, every massive, crisscrossing slew of curves and lines and patterns has already been proven out by the puzzles you’ve solved. Your reward for doing well in Engare isn’t unlocking more pattern-generation options; it’s the ability to understand the incredible combination of rotations and line patterns that went into each one and how they’re all geometrically solvable thanks to their adherence to X and Y axes.
Source: Engare review: The geometry of Islamic art becomes a treasure of a game | Ars Technica
Verdict: Buy two copies; donate the second one to a school computer lab.
Main site: http://www.engare.design/
Only $6 on Steam. I Will be trying it out on my Steam account.
Before committing any real money, the researchers tested the idea on 10 years of historical data on the closing odds and results of 479,440 soccer games played between 2005 and 2015. This simulation paid out 44 percent of the time and delivered a yield of 3.5 percent over the 10-year period. “For an imaginary stake of $50 per bet, this corresponds to an equivalent profit of $98,865 across 56,435 bets,” they say.
Source: The Secret Betting Strategy That Beats Online Bookmakers – MIT Technology Review
“Texas Rope ‘Em is not entitled to First Amendment protection because it does not convey any messages or ideas. Unlike books, movies, music, plays and video games—mediums of expression that typically enjoy First Amendment protection—Texas Rope ‘Em has no plot, no storylines, no characters, and no dialogue. All it conveys is a random display of cards and a map. Absent the communicative features that invoke the First Amendment, Candy Lab has no First Amendment claim,” the county said. (PDF)
Source: Augmented reality lawsuit provides augmented view of 1st Amendment | Ars Technica
No plot, storylines, characters, and dialog describes the Academy Award winner for best picture last year.
As they continue to move away from traditional sports viewing, a growing number of Millennials are instead flocking to alternatives such as eSports, including live video-gaming competitions such as The International, an annual tournament devoted to DOTA 2. Though such events aren’t organized in the traditional sense, the growing popularity of eSports nonetheless has the potential to further diminish Millennials’ loyalty to traditional sports.
But now even Ke, the reigning top-ranked Go player, has acknowledged that human beings are no match for robots in the complex board game, after he lost three games to an AI that mysteriously popped up online in recent days.
The AI turned out to be AlphaGo in disguise.