Fluffy Gamers

The World of Warcraft community has been up in arms this week, as the Blizzard revealed that in the upcoming expansion set, Warlords of Draenor, flying mounts would be turned off until the first major content patch. What could be more perfect a way to get the fans foaming at the mouth than to disable their heard-earned magical mounts; typically used as a way of demonstrating prestige among fellow players, as many of them are available only through completing difficult achievements. Indeed it is rather amusing watching people get so upset over this controversial move, as if they felt like they were having their own property taken away. In fact the simple matter is that they don’t own anything in World of Wacraft, the terms of service states that it’s all owned by Blizzard and they can take it away at any given time. Seeing the reaction over the Warlords of Draenor flying mounts thing makes me wonder how fans will react when Blizzard one day announces that they are closing their servers and thusly, deleting all characters. Perhaps we’ll see some amusing court cases popping up.

In fact, Blizzard has a very understandable reason for taking this step. They announced at Blizzcon that the new continent will have a focus on exploration, which can be rewarded with rare or even epic items. Presumably these items will be significant in their power, comparable perhaps to loot dropping in the first raid tier. If players were able to fly around the map looking for these rewards, without investing much effort at all into the exploration aspect, then the system would be unquestionably broken. Understand this and it becomes incredibly clear why, with Warlords of Draenor, flying mounts will become accessible only after the second tier is released, making the items available through exploration somewhat less powerful by comparison to the top tier loot.

So here it is, details about our Forced Game Give Away. Forced is a new co-op based Action RPG from BetaDwarf, and we’ve got some copies to give away! For your chance to win a copy of Forced simply enter the draw using the raffle tool below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

We’ll select the winners by 4/11/13!

Riot unveils plans to introduce a Team Builder tool to League of Legends

One problem that frequently pops up in League of Legends matchmaking system, is that during normal matchmaking players immediately spam the chat with their preferred role once a match has been found, and if they don’t get their own way, they often resort to ‘trolling.’ This can be highly frustrating if all you are looking to do is play a normal match and don’t necessarily mind which role you are playing. Indeed, one thing that often escapes these dim witted individuals is that playing different roles and champions often, increases your knowledge and skill at the game and is an invaluable part of becoming better. Another point they often miss is that League of Legends is a team-game and that if everyone just helped each other instead of selfishly pursuing their own goals, they stand a much higher chance of succeeding against their opponent. These rather obvious points aside, the spamming of roles and subsequent inevitable flaming, is a major contributor to the verbal abuse that occurs in the game; something that Riot nobly and rightfully aims minimize.

With this is mind, it’s great news to hear that they have come up with a way of dealing with this problem (or, more specifically, the problem of those people who simply have to have it their own way.) The proposed solution is something called the Team Builder. This upcoming tool will enable players to select, upfront, exactly which champion and role they desire to play, what sort of strategy they have in mind, and then endeavour to match them with players whom presumably find this agreeable.  So, all is well with the world, those players who insist on playing their one and only role or champion, will be given a place to go; after all the tool, Riot says, will be optional. A good thing too, because presumably this proposed system of meta matchmaking will bring with it more substantial queue times. The flip side of that argument of course is that a lot of time usually wasted on dodged matches or those ruined by trolls, can now happily be avoided.

Will it enforce the meta?

In their forum post, Riot addressed several concerns players might have about this proposed system. Chief among them was the ideal that this tool will enforce the standard meta game. This appears to be somewhat answered by the fact that the tool itself will allow players to formulate various discrepant lane assignments, if they feel like testing non conformist tactics for a change. If, for some bizarre reason, a player feels like running with three champions mid and one bot and top, the Team Builder tool apparently gives players the means to set this up and agree on it in advance. How well that actually works in practice remains to be seen, naturally.

Goodbye Trolls?

How well this tool works in terms of queue times and the meta game is one issue. However, perhaps the main benefit of the League of Legends Team Builder won’t be felt by those who use it, but by those who do not use it. In other words, by giving players who refuse to play anything but their desired role and champion an avenue to do that, their presence will be significantly diminished in the normal queue. This of course remains to be seen; but if it turns out to work as proposed, Riot might just have come up with the best means yet enacted to reduce the flame wars that occur in League of Legends. Time will tell!

We’ve been enjoying Cube World so much recently that we decided to produce our own fan trailer! Cube World, currently available as a buy-in alpha, has been providing us with hours of multi-player fun. We wanted to share our love of the game with the community and so we came up with the idea of doing our own Cube World fan trailer. There are other similar videos out there on YouTube, but we wanted to join in and share our experiences as well. I even composed and produced a musical theme, especially for the video.

Cube World has been in development for the past two years, starting as a hobby project for the husband and wife dev team at Picroma. It’s gained a lot of attention leading up to the release of the buy-in alpha version of the game. Once the game was featured on popular YouTube gaming channel, Yogscast, it gained massive hype and momentum. That resulted in Picroma’s site being down during the initial flood of people trying to buy the alpha. But normality finally returned and the game is now available again. The alpha costs less than the final game, in much the fashion that Minecraft worked before the release version of the game came out.

Cube World Fan Trailer

We assembled our fan trailer using gameplay footage recorded during our multi-player Cube World adventures. We tried to include shots that show off the beautiful procedurally generated landscapes we’ve discovered, as well as some of the most epic battles we’ve been involved in. The music for our Cube World fan trailer was written with this in mind and the footage was then edited to fit the beat of the song: An Endless World. We hope the community enjoys our fan trailer, and look forward to seeing more people’s Cube World adventures on YouTube in the future!

Fluffy Gaming sat down to discuss all the awesome game-play features that WildStar has to offer. WildStar is an upcoming MMORPG from Carbine Studios. The world of the MMO has seen a lot of evolution in recent years, with titles like Guild Wars 2 pushing a more action combat style of game-play. WildStar is rich in features that push this evolution further than ever, as well as bringing back a lot of core principles from the early days of the MMO.

WildStar Features

One of the big things that excites us about WildStar’s features, is the return of epic forty man raiding. This was something that made raiding back in original World of Warcraft so exciting. The idea of being part of a huge team to bring down a really powerful enemy brought a a great sense of accomplishment and community to the MMO experience, and it seems the WildStar devs are in full favour of this. Indeed, many of the core developers working on the game were part of the original team behind World of Warcraft.

Action combat is another of WildStar’s exciting features. This is part of that evolution we talked about before, the idea that combat should be more than simply bashing a set rotation. WildS

We were huge fans of the original Dungeon Defenders here at Fluffy Gaming, so when news reached us that Dungeon Defenders 2 is in the pipeline, complete with an all new MOBA style pvp mode, we were practically jumping for joy. The original Dungeon Defenders, from Trendy Entertainment, was an imaginative mix of Tower Defence and RPG loot gathering, tied together by fantastic cartoon visuals and a humorous story about kids protecting the castle while the grown up heroes are away saving the world. Players levelled up their heroes and gathered loot and pets, becoming more powerful and taking on bigger challenges. It was serious fun and we put in many hours of play as we geared up our heroes. The game was and still is supported by Trendy with updates and DLC, although the studio has said that this will slow down in the lead up to the release of the sequel.

Dungeon Defenders 2 is set to expand on the original game in a number of ways. There will be a 24 player over-world (we’re assuming this is just a grander replacement for the tavern), where players can gather and set up games. There will be 24 heroes available, with more being released later as purchasable DLC content. Not only this but Dungeon Defenders 2 will (in an arguably somewhat risky move) be free to play, meaning that players can pick up the game and start playing for free, with Trendy relying on the micro-transaction model, which has worked tremendously well for many games now, to make it’s money. This means that as new heroes and extra content are released players will be able to choose to buy those extras for a fee, but the game itself will be completely free.

A Dungeon Defenders 2 MOBA Mode!

Dungeon Defenders 2 is not just a sequel, though. Trendy have decided to develop an entire new mode of play into the sequel: a 5v5 competitive mode, based on the popular MOBA gameplay of titles like DOTA and League of Legends. This is somewhat unsurprising given the massive success and revenue generated by the e-sports driven MOBA machine, which literally has constant tournaments and hundreds of thousands of viewers watching streams around the clock. Trendy has stated that the MOBA pvp of Dungeon Defenders 2 will have some distinctive features that set it apart from all the other MOBA games out there currently, such as persistent character levels and loot, and other more RPG based elements. This seems to suggest that they are not necessarily making a big push for this game as a serious hardcore e-sport platform, and that the mode is simply there to provide a pvp environment inside an already great co-op game. Time will tell.

Like other MOBAs Dungeon Defenders 2 will have a free hero rotation, changing every week, with heroes able to be purchased by players. Items and loot acquired in the MOBA mode will be able to be used in the co-op mode.

Beta

Dungeon Defenders 2 is currently in a closed beta test of it’s pvp mode, which will be the first part of the game released (perhaps signifying that this will be the major component of this sequel). The co-op mode will release later. Players can sign up for beta access on the official website.

The League of Legends surrender button needs to die. One of the things we’ve noticed an awful lot of since we began playing League of Legends, is the tendency for people in random groups to want to press the surrender button once they have died a handful of times. That’s right, even as early as twenty minutes into a game (the earliest you can press the surrender button in a League of Legends match), players are opting to surrender because they believe the game to be a lost cause. It’s not all doom and gloom for those of us with a bit more of a sporting approach to the game, as the surrender button does come down to a vote in League of Legends, a vote which you can control if you are playing with a friend as it only takes two ‘no’ votes to overrule the surrender.

The funny thing about all this is that in many cases, the games people are wanting to surrender, could easily be won turned around with a bit of teamwork and skill. Instead, what tends to happen, is that players start crying like little girls about the fact that they cannot believe you don’t want to surrender; in other words, channelling their energy into very much the wrong direction, a direction that honestly just ends up with them looking like a big crybaby who has thrown his toys out of the pram. If nothing else, this is highly amusing and provides a good bit of background entertainment while you concentrate on defending your base against the rampaging enemy team.

Remove the League of Legends Surrender Button?

This is all too frequent. It’s actually so frequent that the amusing crying show these people put on is getting a bit boring. We also sort of think the League of Legends surrender button takes a lot of fun out of the game for all parties involved. It’s frustrating when you are on the winning side and the enemy team just decides to surrender, because you are enjoying the game and then suddenly it’s called off because your opponents don’t have the sportsmanship to stick with the game. Can you imagine a football match where England is winning against Brazil 6 – 0 (no, me neither, but stick with me) and Brazil just suddenly walks off the pitch, because losing so badly is causing them to cry so badly that the pitch is in danger of flooding?

Quitting is just downright uncompetitive. So it’s actually quite puzzling as to why Riot decided the game needed it. Personally, we think that the League of Legends surrender button needs to die a horrible death. What about you? Let us know what you think.

Join us for more epic fails as we drag ourselves through yet another terrible round of League of Legends noob style. In this game Tim picked Tristana for AD Carry and was joined by Protospect supporting with Singed. Robski took Olaf and generally flapped about a bit failing in every possible direction. While Rentaka took top with Kayle, but then, apparently, didn’t take top. The one random player in our team, Lux, was simply AFK for the entire game, which made things a bit more difficult for us, on top of all the failing we were doing ourselves. All in all this was a terrible match, filled with many humorous quips, destined to provide hours of enjoyment to our viewers. I particularly enjoyed the part where I boldly leapt into the fray and killed Pantheon while everyone else cowered behind the turrets like the mere mortals they are.

Join the League of Legends Noob Squad!

As always, we invite people to come and join us in our League of Legends noob escepades. Feel free to add us if you are playing on the EU servers, and we will more than happily play a few rounds with you. Although, to be honest, I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would want to do that. We are so bad!

Once again there is a LOL Replay file available for this match, which can be found here: http://www.leaguereplays.com/replays/match/2923609/

Fluffy Podcast Episode 5 [ 25:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve been AFK for a while! But now we’re back with a whole new podcast discussing all sorts of things. From where we’ve been, to what we’ve been playing and what we’re interested in in the gaming sphere currently. Check it out!

CES brought us some very interesting news for the future of gaming. Xi3 unveiled the Piston, which to all intents and purposes appears to be the long anticipated ‘Steambox,’ a device that brings Steam games to your living room HDTV from a grapefruit sized modular PC. If that wasn’t enough nVidia also announced Shield: a handheld game streaming device! Full details in the video above!