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Huawei technicians may have helped African governments spy on opponents
An investigation by The Washington Post claims Huawei technicians helped African governments spy on domestic political opponents. According to the report, Huawei employees helped authorities in Uganda intercept encrypted messages and allowed police in Zambia to locate opposition bloggers. Such claims could validate the Trump administration's concerns about the use of Huawei technology in the US, but Huawei told The Washington Post it has "never been engaged in 'hacking' activities."
The Daily Grind: Who's your favorite villain?
Sometimes villains are individuals, sometimes they're simply faceless armies. Sometimes they're major antagonists, sometimes they just harass you a bit in low-level zones. But every game has antagonists, even if they're no more organized than "those animals milling outside of the front gates." In EVE Online they might be other players, in World of Warcraft they change with the expansion, and in Guild Wars 2 they arrive gift-wrapped with two-week bursts of content to accompany their arrivals. In some games all you can do is kick them around a bit, while in some games your favorite villain has likely been met, matched, and defeated, never to rise again. So today we ask you: Who's your favorite villain? Is it a group of villains, like the Freakshow in City of Heroes? A single figure like Gaius van Baelsar in Final Fantasy XIV? Or is it just a group you personally hate, like every roaming aggressive animal on Voss in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Take a tour of Final Fantasy XIV's monsters
It's no secret that Final Fantasy XIV will host quite a number of monsters. Some of those are already familiar to players from both the beta weekends and from the original game, but there are a lot of monsters even after you count those. The team behind the game has put together a new trailer showing off the various monsters and humanoid enemies that players will encounter on the fields of Eorzea. Some of these will be familiar, such as spriggans and coblyns. Some will be unfamiliar in Eorzea but familiar to fans of the series, such as the behemoth and the tonberry. And others are imported from other games or are completely novel. So whether it runs, flies, crawls, swims, or portals through the void, you can see it in the video embedded just past the break. And then you can spend the next week before testing guessing at how you're going to kill it.
Storyboard: Villainy afoot
I really thought this was a topic I had revisited on a few occasions, but apparently the only time Storyboard has discussed villainy was back in the column's infancy when I was still properly finding its voice. (Not that I feel that project has ever stopped, but that's another matter.) And it's an interesting topic for many reasons because villainy as a concept really gets put through the wringer in RP to begin with, especially if you tend to let morality be muddled into a few million shades of gray like I tend to. The thing about villains in roleplaying is having a character solely meant as A Villain generally doesn't work as well, simply because no real people are as malicious as that might require. Instead, you wind up with several people serving as the villains in a particular timeframe. So we need to define what we mean by villains, what role they can play in roleplaying, and what the pitfalls are in the first place.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy's bargain bin villains
The Final Fantasy series has always had some spectacularly memorable villains. Sometimes that's been a challenge; this is a series in which your main antagonists have included an evil tree, a general who dresses up like a clown, and an adult version of the creepy kid from grade school who can't breathe very well. But for some reason, this has never carried over into the online installments. And with Final Fantasy XIV's first major villain debuting in the current patch, it's worth talking about. I don't mean to say that Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV haven't had antagonists or anyone to step into the role of "villain." They certainly have. Final Fantasy XI has an entire rogue's gallery with Eald'narche, Promathia, the Shadow Lord, and whatever we were fighting in Abyssea. (I think it was the dread monster Apathy, but I sort of clocked out for a while there.) But compare it to the villains of Star Wars: The Old Republic or the single-player installments of the franchise. Heck, compare them to the villains of World of Warcraft. The villains here just don't quite get to a memorable level, and I think there are a few good reasons.
WildStar Wednesday showcases a rogue's gallery full of rogues
WildStar is shaping up to be a lot of things, but "peaceful" isn't one of them. Players watching the various previews already have an idea of what the more natural threats in the game world will look like. This week's installment of WildStar Wednesday focuses on a much more human element, however: three different criminal organizations that all have a decided interest in the region of Algoroc. As if the wildlife wasn't bad enough, you have to contend with all manner of criminals as well. Marauders are intergalactic pirates, the Darkspur Cartel is essentially an interstellar mafia, and the Crowe Gang is a group of smugglers and moonshine brewers. But all of them have an interest in Algoroc, and none of them are open to outsiders or anything law-abiding in the area. That means players are going to have to face off against all three, and from the looks of the preview, none of these groups will go down easily.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Spotlight on Hellions & Skulls
In every hierarchy, there has to be someone on the bottom, and that's where the Skulls and the Hellions sit. Sure, these gangs are terrifying to the civilian populace of Paragon City, but to heroes they're little more than a mild irritant. (They're probably less terrifying to the civilian populace of the Rogue Isles just by virtue of terror overload.) The one thing they're perfect for, however, is starting at the bottom of the many enemy groups within City of Heroes, because these two gangs are likely to be among your first enemies and the ones you level past the fastest. Normally, villain groups deserve their own writeups, but in the case of these two gangs they can't help but be lumped together. Not just because they're similar in play, but because they're similar in structure. They're both the new kids on the block, metaphorically speaking, and they;'ve both made aggressive gains in various parts of Paragon City. The good fortune of one necessitates the fall of the other, even if one of the gangs is clearly destined for disintegration sooner or later. So let's look at the facemask-wearing enemies of the early-level game.
The Daily Grind: What enemy groups do you feel are overused?
There's no denying that the Praetorian Clockwork of City of Heroes are a cool-looking gang of robots. They're powerful, military, and intimidating in numbers, and their prominence in recent task forces isn't unwelcome. Of course, after fighting them all through the first 20 levels of the game, and then fighting them in the most recent task forces, and then fighting more of them in the upcoming Issue 20... some players might be getting just a bit tired of seeing the war machines stomping about. World of Warcraft has at least one troll dungeon per expansion, Star Trek Online loves its Borg, and of course you've got Orcs from dawn to dusk in Lord of the Rings Online. Sometimes they make sense; sometimes they don't. But there's always one group of enemies that seems to get trotted out more often than others. So what group do you feel gets brought into the forefront just a bit too often in your game of choice? Was it a group that you used to like but have grown bored of, or one you never found all that interesting? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
