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Destiny beta: 88.3 million games played
Last week, Bungie revealed that 4.6 million players participated in Destiny's beta phase, a program that pushed the game's servers ahead of its September 9 launch. The developer has since offered more numbers behind the beta in large infographic form, found after the break. Destiny's beta program saw 88,384,720 games played as well as the creation of 6.5 million guardians. The community's kill-to-death ratio in the cooperative story, strike and exploration missions was 22.53, thanks to a grand total of 3.7 billion kills during those quests. What's more, Bungie's Saturday field trip to the moon resulted in 853,235 concurrent players. Relive the Destiny beta through our archived discussions and livestreams, in which we determined we would appreciate an apartment in the game's tower, but still enjoyed kicking back in the social sections. [Image: Activision]
NFL players to wear shoulder pad RFIDs for on-field stats tracking
The NBA isn't the only professional sports league in the States getting serious about accurate stats accounting. With some help from Zebra Technologies' location system, 17 NFL stadiums will use receivers and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags inside player's shoulder pads to track movement. The setup provides real-time position data for each player, offering up precise info on acceleration, speed, routes and distance as part of the "Next Gen Stats" initiative for fans. Referees are getting the tags too, in case you've ever wanted more info on those fellas. "Zebra's tracking technology will help teams to evolve training, scouting and evaluation through increased knowledge of player performance, as well as provide ways for our teams and partners to enhance the fan experience," says NFL VP of Media Strategy Vishal Shah. The 15 venues that are hosting Thursday night games are getting outfitted, with Detroit and New Orleans added in to make sure each team gets tallied.
Camelot Unchained's use-based stat system will trade grind for immersion
This week, the folks at City State Entertainment have a massive game mechanics infodump planned for Camelot Unchained fans as part of its "batshit-crazy" reveal week. A few weeks ago, we spoke with CSE co-founder Mark Jacobs about each of the topics being presented to backers this week on Twitch, so to coincide with today's announcements, we asked about the mechanics of the sandbox's proposed stat system. Enjoy the reveal and the interview! Massively: Can you explain the thinking behind allowing players to fall into "gotcha" builds, unwittingly creating characters that simply will not perform well in the game? By the same token, does the studio not anticipate the preset classes to result in attendant cookie cutter stat builds? CSE's Mark Jacobs: We've been very clear from the beginning of the Kickstarter that we are going to allow players to create builds that aren't 'ideal' for their class or even race selection. Now, having said this, we've also been clear we will present plenty of information so they can make informed choices. I want to give players the freedom to play a race/class/stat combination that is not ideal, but to also warn them and give them the ability to read lots of information at the same time. We are also considering giving out a limited respec after creation just in case, for example, you quickly realize trying to play a Luchorpan tank that you made as small and weak as possible wasn't a great idea.
Android still the dominant mobile OS with 1 billion active users
Free-falling product demos and Rube Goldberg multimedia installations aside, there's always a level of predictability to an opening day keynote. And Google I/O 2014 is no exception. Like clockwork, SVP Sundar Pichai took to the stage in San Francisco this morning to tick off the company's latest accomplishments. He started off by touting one of the company's biggest strengths: Android. According to Pichai, Google now has over 1 billion active users (that's as of the last 30 days) on the OS.
Explaining Versatility
As we've said here plenty of times, it's not real until it goes live, and that goes for the new stats being designed for Warlords of Draenor. Last year we discussed Amplify, Multistrike and Readiness - since then things have changed. As always keeping in mind that this is still subject to change right up until the point of release, we now have an entirely new stat, and both Amplify and Readiness are no longer stats. Instead, Versatility. What is Versatility and how will it work? Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It's a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role's performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. We won't be tuning it to be anyone's highest throughput secondary stat, but it'll be close, and it'll give you a nice boost to how versatile your character is in the process. It'll be especially attractive to hybrids who want to feel more "hybridy." I reproduced the explanation from the Dev Watercooler because I wanted to highlight how this works, and more important, how it is still a stat which can be tuned. On the face of it, 1% Versatility is incredibly simple - just as 1% Critical Strike Chance increases your chance to critically hit by 1%, 1% Versatility increases your damage, healing and damage absorption by 1%, which also reducing your damage taken by .5%. How does this differ from the proposed effect of Amplify? Why, in other words, is Versatility a worthwhile trade for the previously proposed stat?
Apple's WWDC 2014 in numbers: 40 million on Mavericks, 800 million iOS devices and billions of apps
Charts, graphs and stats: These are the things Apple keynotes are made of, and today's WWDC 2014 kickoff was no different. CEO Tim Cook took to the stage this morning at the Moscone Center in San Francisco armed with enough numerical ammunition to put your best boardroom PowerPoint Keynote to shame. Cook kicked things off boasting that over 40 million copies of OS X Mavericks have been installed and more than 50 percent of the install base is working on its latest OS. He went on to point out that while PC sales continued to slip (down 5 percent, according to Cook), Apple's computer sales are growing.
EVE Online infographic details what makes the game unique
A new infographic created by A Winning Personality blogger Merike Taal showcases EVE Online with a huge focus on what sets it apart from all other MMOs. "If you've never heard of EVE Online," the infographic states, "here's why you should start paying attention." With details on everything from the trifecta of alliance power to stats on the space MMO's largest battles, this infographic seems mostly to target those who are either unaware of or unconvinced of EVE's allure. You can check out the complete graphic after the cut.
Stats 201: Getting your secondary stats just right
Though we did an article covering the game's basic stats that will guide you through leveling any character, once you hit level 90 you need to start considering your secondary stats. These stats, like hit and expertise, become more important when you stop leveling through content and gear to stop at top-tier content. Unfortunately, figuring out what these stats are, what they do, and what you need isn't exactly self-explanatory -- sometimes even requiring you to consult an addon or website to figure out whether a new piece of gear is really an upgrade. Fortunately, Blizzard is working on simplifying the system with Warlords of Draenor, removing a some secondary stats and the ability to reforge gear -- which will make it a lot easier to tell what gear is an upgrade and start using it immediately. Unfortunately, if you're a new 90 or you've just boosted a new character to 90, you still have to deal with the current system, so we'll lay out just what the secondary stats on your gear mean -- and how to tweak them to your liking with reforging so you're ready to hop into LFR or whatever else you want to do.
Broken Age on sale for 33% off, game contains 15 minutes of credits [Update: Sale over]
The first act of Double Fine's Kickstarted adventure game, Broken Age, is currently on sale for its lowest price ever on Steam. For $16.74 you can get the game, or for $20.09, you can snag the game as well as a copy of the soundtrack. Hurry though, because at the time of posting, you've only got two and a half hours to take advantage of the deal. The release of Act 1 existed partly to fund the development of Act 2, so the back half of the game isn't ready to go just yet. Those who purchase ahead of Act 2's release will be given the conclusion as a free update, according to Double Fine. Double Fine also announced a slew of statistics regarding Broken Age's production, in case you're the type who was ever curious about just how many lines of code go into creating a game like this. (Hint: it's a lot.) It's also been a time-consuming project: over the course of 22 months (or 339 man-months), the team has created 1,181 cutscenes, recorded 4,417 lines of voice, and consumed more than 680 gallons of coffee. Broken Age also takes 15 minutes (at a resolution of 1024x768) to show off 12,846 name strings during the credits. Broken Age: it's kind of a big deal. Update: The sale for Broken Age has come to its conclusion. The game is $24.99 once more. [Image: Double Fine]
Eerie comparisons between MMOs and real life surface
We all joke about how unrealistic MMOs are to our mundane, tax-filled lives, but Redcentric did a little digging to compare how virtual worlds and the real one stack up in various ways. Some of the results proved astounding. With World of Warcraft, Redcentric noted that the population in both the game and the US military have about the same percentage of males (84% to 83%), while EVE Online's male population (96%) is more similar to that of the astronaut crowd (90%). The agency also noted how Second Life has 10 real-world embassies in it and that a previous ban of real-money trading in the game caused a very real financial crisis for a bank that wiped out $750,000. So how do these three titles compare to real-world cities in regards to population? World of Warcraft at its peak was close to Moscow's population (11.5 million), while Second Life almost hit the levels of San Fransisco (825K) and EVE Online barely surpassed Edinburgh's 495,000.
The future of itemization
I've written long, eloquent defenses of reforging. And this week, I finally snapped. The fact that I have to reforge between my arms spec and my fury spec (and not just reforge, but regem) has finally broken me. I now take it all back - reforging sucks. It compensates for things that are flaws in the modern game, but I no longer find that charming. I just find it irritating that those faults exist and that we have a means to wallpaper over them doesn't change the fact that they exist. In a way, my relationship with reforging mirrors my relationship with the old tanking scheme that existed before Mists of Pandaria - I knew there were flaws with threat generation, but I'd grown familiar with them. I understood that they were there and how to circumvent them. In the modern game, there are significant flaws with itemization, and reforging is that means to circumvent them, so I've been a big booster of and supporter of it ever since it was introduced back in Cataclysm. But I was wrong. Using reforging to sandpaper down the jagged edges where gear doesn't meet our needs doesn't change the fact that gear doesn't meet our needs - it merely conceals those edges. We know that we're going to have two new stats - multistrike and readiness - in addition to critical strike, haste and mastery. None of these are caps in the same way that hit or expertise are (soon to be were) - we'll see how they work, but we already know some talents will affect them or be affected by them, like the upcoming Anger Management talent for warriors. So what I'm wondering is, are we finally going to see a situation where there's enough gear with stats individual classes want that we don't need a system to make up for gear's shortcomings? Or are we just going to have to make the best of bad itemization again, like we did back in Wrath?
Twitch Plays Pokemon final stats: 1.1 million players, 36 million views
Twitch has announced the final statistics for cultural phenomenon Twitch Plays Pokemon, which came to a dramatic close earlier today. And while only one pokemon trainer can be the very best, more than 1.1 million people tried. The actual number of TPP "players" - as in, those who entered commands in the game's chat - totaled 1,165,140, according to the Twitch official blog. As if that weren't quite ridiculous enough, here's some more rare candy to chew on: Total time: 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds Peak players: 121,000 Commands issued: More than 122 million Onlookers: More than 9 million Total views: More than 36 million Total minutes watched: More than 1 billion For reference, the total number of views is more than twice that of Shanghai, the city with the highest recorded population in the world. Granted those aren't all unique views, but that's still a freaking lot of views. Unofficial stats have also been collected by the community, for those who'd like to know just when each magical moment transpired. According to one account, it took Twitch Plays Pokemon 22 tries to beat the Elite Four. It only took them two tries to beat Blue, the game's archenemy. Two! The weight of TPP cannot be overstated - aside from the various memes and religions it's created, there's even a petition to have the US government officially recognize March 1 as Helix Day. Praise Helix. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
Blood Pact: So you want to play a warlock
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill explores the beginning of MoP. The next thing is to write a "how to warlock" at 90 series, but I feel like I've done this before. The deja vu is strong with this one topic. Oh right! I wrote something like it back in 2012, when the big patch 5.0 first came out. Not all of the same advice is relevant -- well, Soul Link isn't what it was anymore, for one -- but the basics are all still there. I'll go over the specs in detail later, so let's start with the general introduction to warlocks.
The Nexus Telegraph: Making it how you'd like in WildStar
I freely admit that I have not dived heavily into crafting in the WildStar beta, for the same reason that there is a lot of stuff in the WildStar beta that I have not heavily invested in. That reason is simple: I plan to be playing this game for a long while, and I'd really like to avoid burning out before it even releases. I didn't adhere to that rule in the Final Fantasy XIV beta and kind of felt the pinch, so this is a rule I learned the hard way. That having been said, I've fooled around with it enough to be really excited after the last interview I had regarding the crafting experience. What I heard confirmed my limited experiences and offered some interesting food for thought. There are a couple of elements that might seem counterproductive and a lot more that are worth looking forward to in the future.
Star Trek Online posts a four-year infographic
Space -- it's not really much of a frontier any longer. These are the voyages of a large number of different ships in Star Trek Online. Their continuing missions: To complete reputation projects. To seek out new ships and new duty officers. To boldly go where a lot of people have gone over the past four years -- specifically, 3.2 million captains -- but it's still worth exploring just the same! With the official four-year mark for the game just around the corner, Cryptic Studios has put out a new infographic detailing stuff like exactly how many captains are currently exploring the final not-so-much-a-frontier. It also contains a handy timeline of the game's major content releases over the past four years and all of the former Trek actors now providing voices to iconic characters in the game. If you want a quick look at the game's history for yourself, check out the infographic on the official site.
World of Warcraft breaks out a decade in Azeroth by the numbers
World of Warcraft is hitting its 10-year anniversary this year, and the franchise as a whole is turning 20. So it's a find time to take a look at the numbers behind the game, something Blizzard Entertainment did today with a large and exhaustive infographic. That header up there? That's a count of how many worldwide accounts the game has had created, including trials. Yes, that's 100 million. That's a lot of people who have stepped into Azeroth (or Outland for a little while). There are a lot of interesting bits of information in there as well. As a whole, the game has seen more than 500 million characters created (more characters than there are people in the United States). Approximately 2.8 million auction house transactions take place every day, 11 million achievements have been earned per day since the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and the game currently sits on about 6 million words written for quest content. There's a lot more in the infographic; feel free to jump on over and take a look at it for more stats on the game's decade of history.
The Daily Grind: How often do you inspect people?
I swear, I'm not trying to examine you for your gear. I really don't care about that. I'm examining you because your outfit looks really nice and I want to see how you did it. I want to find out your vanity-based secrets. I want to build on that outfit to produce something gorgeous the next time I hit the streets. Anyone can play Final Fantasy XIV, but I intend to do so with a fair bit of style. Some games don't really let you do this. I can't find out your clothing from examining your character in The Secret World. Some games reward people who are peeking at stats more than at a character's outfits. And some people really don't care in the slightest. So what about you? How often do you inspect people? In-game, obviously; if you're hovering behind Dennis from accounting and carefully counting the number of threads in his shirt, that's creepy, but not the sort of inspection we're talking about. 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!
Hulu Plus passes 5 million subscribers, plans to double its original content
New Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins chimed in this week with the video streaming site's yearly recap, and pointed out a few big numbers as evidence it's headed in the right direction. In 2013 Hulu will top $1 billion in revenue and 5 million paying customers for its Hulu Plus service, which compares to $695 million and 3 million subscribers in 2012, and 4 million subscribers back in April. That's not a bad haul for a site that was almost sold -- again -- and lost former CEO Jason Kilar this year, but while those numbers are up, they were going up faster last year. All the while its competition is getting stronger as Netflix has over 40 million subscribers, Amazon pushes its Prime subscription service with licensed content and new original shows, and the TV networks that feed Hulu roll out streaming sites of their own (Fox Now, Watch ABC). Still, Hulu's trump card is that it offers current season TV shows many others don't have yet, and Hopkins proudly notes it has seven of the current top ten TV shows ready for streaming at any time. Right now Hulu hosts over 2,900 TV series, with plans to take this year's 20 original series and double that number "over the next few years." Like Netflix and Amazon, Hulu isn't posting viewer numbers, but Hopkins says original shows like The Wrong Mans, Behind the Mask and The Awesomes performed "extremely well" and are among the top 10 shows viewed. We think Hulu could use a drama like House of Cards to pull in viewers next year, but one more year of sale or IPO rumors about it splitting off from owners Disney, Fox and NBC Universal could be just as entertaining.
Microsoft: Over 50 million hours logged on Xbox Ones since launch
In the realm of esoteric statistics, Microsoft announced that over 50 million hours in "games and entertainment" have been logged on Xbox One systems since it launched on November 22. The console manufacturer added that over 415 million Gamerscore points were unlocked via achievements on the system. Microsoft also noted a few other in-game milestones achieved in individual Xbox One games, such as the number of miles driven in Forza 5 globally (90 million), zombies killed in Dead Rising 3 (three billion), combos achieved in Killer Instinct (150 million) and enemies defeated in Ryse: Son of Rome (186 million). By comparison, EA announced that over 140 million gameplay minutes were logged in its games on PS4 in the console's opening five days. To add to today's numbers, Sony announced that global PS4 sales exceed 2.1 million, though we're not certain how that translates to hours spent or zombies destroyed or how close that is to the moon when you stack them all, etc.
Spotify tries to win over artists by predicting their future royalties
While Spotify has shown that a streaming music model can be successful, it's consistently come under fire over an apparent lack of financial support for new artists. To boost that relationship, the company has launched a new website, Spotify Artists, with the intention of cutting through the noise to explain how much musicians could be paid if they decide to stream their music. Spotify uses real-world, albeit anonymized, examples to demonstrate how its business model works and details how it calculates royalties, which have already passed the $500 million mark this year. Spotify realizes it can't do it all alone, so it's brought on board two new partners to provide some additional muscle. Next Big Sound's Artist Analytics dashboard processes Spotify's music metrics to track how music spreads and who's listening to it, helping artists decide when might be the best time to embark on a tour or new promotional campaign. With support from Topspin, you'll soon be able to grab yourself a branded tee or limited-edition vinyl along with your gig tickets, directly supporting your favorite acts from within the Spotify app. While most of its free features are already available, Spotify says we can expect to see its new ticket and merchandise listings go live "in the upcoming months," giving it some additional ammo in the fight against streaming non-believers.
