Rock Band Rivals Season 12 is a Playlist of Awesome and Available Now
Season 12 is now live and will take us right through the center of (northern hemisphere) Summer, which is the perfect excuse to stay inside and play Rock Band Rivals.
Rivals Mode – Themed Challenges from the Rock Band Catalog
Rivals Seasons are a set of eight themed Challenges played out week-to-week using portions of your existing song library. Players team up online, working together to promote their Crews and earn exclusive cosmetics for their band. For Season 12, we’re profiling the many tastes of the Harmonix staff. Each week a different person will craft a Challenge centered around their favorite songs in Rock Band’s expansive catalog. We’ve got folks from all over the company participating and it’s been really interesting to see what songs people pick for their week. It will be fun to see what weeks resonate most with players – there are bragging rights to be had!
Exclusive Rewards for your Avatar
For Season 12, your rewards will be colorful wings. As you climb the tiers, you’ll get increasingly expressive wings made from each tier’s material and gemstone. From Bronze crystals jutting out of your spine to body-sized Bloodstones floating in position, no one will be confused as to how great you were during Season 12. You’ll get the wings associated with every tier you were in during the Season, so the higher you climb, the more you earn. You’ve still got a bit of time to prep your Crew, so be sure you’re all set to start the Season off on the right foot.
Stay Connected
We also continue to poll our Companion App users, incorporating their feedback in everything from Season structure and quantity, to future rewards and even DLC releasing in Season 12! Don’t have the app yet? You can still download it to get in on the list – the app is completely free and links to your Xbox Gamertag to show account gameplay information. You can view weekly challenge data, see your activity feed, manage/moderate crews, and even engage in app-only features such as crew chat. Thanks to everyone who’s participated in these surveys so far!
A new Season means new beginnings, and whether you’ve played Rivals before or not, it’s a great opportunity to jump in and see what the fuss is about. We’ll see you on the leaderboards in Season 12!
Take part in the next saga of the critically acclaimed FINAL FANTASY® XIV Online with the next legendary expansion pack—SHADOWBRINGERS!
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Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 05:06 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Overwatch League™ Welcomes New Partner Toyota
As North American Launch Partner for the Overwatch League, the automaker looks forward to collaborating on behind-the-scenes content for league fans
IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Following a thrilling opening week for the Overwatch League that drew more than 10 million viewers worldwide, a major new brand-marketing partner has signed on to support the league during its inaugural season: multinational automotive manufacturer Toyota.
Toyota will be a North American Launch Partner for the Overwatch League, and is looking forward to future collaborations around bringing behind-the-scenes content to fans. The automaker plans to have additional broadcast integrations, as well as a vehicle presence at Blizzard Arena Los Angeles.
“Toyota is excited to be a launch partner of the Overwatch League,” said Steven Curtis, vice president, media & engagement marketing for Toyota Motor North America. “We love the passion of esports fans, and the goal of our partnership is to help take the Overwatch League and the fan experience to the next level.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome Toyota to the Overwatch League,” said Pete Vlastelica, president and CEO of Blizzard Entertainment’s MLG division. “When we were building the league, our desire was to create a premium experience for players and fans, and partners like Toyota are helping us do just that.”
The Overwatch League is further supported by sponsors HP® and Intel®, with players competing on cutting-edge gaming hardware including HP’s OMEN gaming PCs, powered by the latest Intel® Core™ i7 processors.
About the Overwatch League™
The Overwatch League™ is the first major global professional esports league with city-based teams across Asia, Europe, and North America. Overwatch® was created by globally acclaimed publisher Blizzard Entertainment (a division of Activision Blizzard—Nasdaq: ATVI), whose iconic franchises have helped lay the foundations and push the boundaries of professional esports over the last 15 years. The latest addition to Blizzard’s stable of twenty-one #1 games,[1] Overwatch was built from the ground up for online competition, with memorable characters and fast-paced action designed for the most engaging gameplay and spectator experiences. To learn more about the Overwatch League, visit www.overwatchleague.com.
About Toyota
Toyota (NYSE:TM) has been a part of the cultural fabric in the U.S. and North America for 60 years, and is committed to advancing sustainable, next-generation mobility through our Toyota and Lexus brands. During that time, Toyota has created a tremendous value chain as our teams have contributed to world-class design, engineering, and assembly of more than 33 million cars and trucks in North America, where we operate 14 manufacturing plants (10 in the U.S.) and directly employ more than 46,000 people (more than 36,000 in the U.S.). Our 1,800 North American dealerships (nearly 1,500 in the U.S.) sold almost 2.7 million cars and trucks (2.45 million in the U.S.) in 2016—and about 85 percent of all Toyota vehicles sold over the past 15 years are still on the road today.
[1] Sales and/or downloads, based on internal company records and reports from key distribution partners
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements: Information in this press release that involves Blizzard Entertainment’s expectations, plans, intentions or strategies regarding the future, including statements about the sponsorship arrangements for Overwatch esports, are forward-looking statements that are not facts and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause Blizzard Entertainment’s actual future results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements set forth in this release include unanticipated product delays and other factors identified in the risk factors sections of Activision Blizzard’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K and any subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements in this release are based upon information available to Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Blizzard as of the date of this release, and neither Blizzard Entertainment nor Activision Blizzard assumes any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements believed to be true when made may ultimately prove to be incorrect. These statements are not guarantees of the future performance of Blizzard Entertainment or Activision Blizzard and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond its control and may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 05:06 AM - Forum: Minecraft
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Minecraft 1.14 Pre-Release 1
We’re now feeling confident enough in the stability and feature-completeness of 1.14 – The Village & Pillage Update – that we’ve decided to enter the pre-release phase. Whilst we know that there are still bugs to be solved and polish to be added, we feel that this version is now good enough that we can ask you all to please help us test and find any issues for a smooth release in a few weeks. Remember to report anything you find to our bug tracker, or give feedback on new features over to our feedback website. It helps us immensely!
A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.
Fixed lots of bugs
Some optimizations
Inside optimize world screen there’s now an option to remove cached world data (e.g. height maps and light), so that it’s recomputed on the next load
MC-134755 – All short mobs drown just below the surface of water
MC-137451 – Mobs heads rotate super quickly when looking around
MC-138979 – Scaffolding switches quickly between entity and block when placed on some non-solid blocks
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 05:06 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Fall Eververse Changes
Hey everyone,
Like we did a few weeks ago on the Livestream, we’re going to continue to talk about how Destiny will continue to evolve this Fall and beyond. This update is about how we’re changing Eververse.
We’ve already made a number of changes to Eververse in Season of Opulence (we’ve redesigned the store, we’ve made Bright Engrams only include Year 1 gear—and have it bias heavily toward giving you items you haven’t unlocked in your Collections), and we’re going to make more changes to the economy, store, and armor in this fall’s patch.
Armor
It stinks to go to the Eververse store and see an item that looks cool and then seeing that the item has bad perks on it. In fact, when we’re setting up the armor, we’d twist ourselves up in knots to make sure the Eververse armor sets didn’t have good perks. We did this because we want the best way to get sweet perks on your armor to be by playing the game, not shopping for enhanced Hand Cannon loaders at Tess. The root cause (dating all the way back to Destiny 1) is that Eververse armor has always had perks/gameplay capability as a part of the package.
We’re done with that. As of this September, all Eververse armor is being converted into Universal Ornaments. These Universal Ornaments can be applied to all of the Legendary armor sets we’re releasing this Fall. They override the look of your equipped gear while preserving the perks, mods, and stats of the original item.
Any Eververse Armor you have acquired in your Collections will have its Universal Ornaments automatically unlocked for use on new Legendary armor. For example, if the song in your heart is to have your Titan roll with the 2018 Tin Man-esque Festival of the Lost Helmet, you can put it on any of the new Legendary armor coming to the game this fall.
Work in progress build.
Evolving Bright Dust
Historically, the best way to earn Bright Dust in Destiny 2 has been to buy a bunch of Bright Engrams, shard everything from the engrams, build a giant bankroll of Bright Dust and then spend it when the Warlock Dire Ahamkara helmet shows up the Bright Dust row in the last week of the season. We’re going to change this.
This Fall we’re changing Bright Dust from a pay- and/or play-to-earn currency to a play-to-earn reward. We’re adding Bright Dust as a reward for completing Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit bounties. We want all players to earn Dust for playing, not for spending money and destroying a bunch of items in their inventory. After you complete all your bounties for the week, there will be an additional avenue to keep grinding out Bright Dust.
It’s also been pretty uncool to go to the Collection screen and spend Bright Dust to get shaders or Ghost Shells or whatever. We’re going to fix that too. Beginning September 17, Eververse items in your Collections will cost Glimmer and Legendary Shards. If you want to keep pulling out that Exotic Sparrow that looks like a motorcycle until you get the good Sparrow perk (Instant Summon), you can do that with Legendary Shards and Glimmer.
Changes to Dismantling Eververse Items
Lastly, because we are changing the cost of pulling things out of the Collections, Eververse items will no longer dismantle into Bright Dust. This Fall, Eververse items will dismantle into Legendary Shards and Glimmer.
However, that means right now the absolute best thing you can do with all the Eververse items you don’t use regularly—armor, Sparrows, shaders, Ghost Shells, transmat effects—is dismantle them. Sitting on a pile of Midnight Talons or Metro Shift from your Year 1 stockpiles? Shard ’em for Dust.
That’s right! Everything must go—dismantle the extra stuff you have in your inventory, build up a huge amount of Bright Dust, and spend it on sweet stuff as it rolls through the Eververse store—because on September 17, everything changes.
TL;DR recap for Twitter:
On September 17, 2019:
All Eververse armor (new and armor you’ve already acquired!) is being converted into Universal Ornaments
Universal Ornaments can be attached to any newly acquired Legendary armor
Bright Dust is going to come from doing bounties, not dismantling things you spent money on
Eververse items can now be pulled from your Collections with Glimmer/Legendary Shards instead of Bright Dust
Before September 17, 2019:
Dismantle all of your unused Eververse items to maximize your Bright Dust reserves
The OpenWhisk open source serverless platform hit graduation status as a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. The designation comes as the serverless ecosystem continues its rapid evolution in meeting the production needs of organizations. The OpenWhisk project itself was initially born out of IBM, which donated its beta-level code into the Apache Incubator project in late 2016. IBM was using that codebase to support functions running on its IBM Cloud. Source: SDX Central
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 03:42 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Rainbow Six Quarantine Release Date Window Set For Early Next Year
Rainbow Six Quarantine was revealed at E3 this year with a vague "early 2020" release window. Now, publisher Ubisoft has narrowed that time frame a little further, although we don't yet have a precise release date.
The company stated in its most recent earnings call that the game will launch before the end of the current financial year (via Game Informer). That means we'll be playing Quarantine by March 31, 2020 at the very latest--barring any delays, of course.
Quarantine is a multiplayer PvE game, in contrast to Siege's predominantly PvP gameplay. The mode appears similar to Rainbow Six Siege Outbreak, a popular limited-time mode. Ubisoft has now decided to split off PvE into its very own game.
"We set out to create a radically re-designed co-op experience built on the foundations of one of the best shooters of this generation. What Siege is to the PVP shooter genre, we want Quarantine to be to co-op," Ubisoft said about the game when it was announced last month.
Like the company's entire library, it will be included in the Uplay+ service set to launch this fall.
Quarantine is designed to sit alongside Siege, rather than replace it. The latter continues to evolve, and its latest Operation Phantom Sight update makes a bunch of Operator changes. You can see more on the new spin-off game, meanwhile, in the video above.
Artistic Smash ‘Em Up Ape Out Gets 30% Discount And Free eShop Demo
If you were curious about checking out the intense beat ’em up action of Ape Out when it launched on Switch earlier this year but never got around to giving it a go, this could be the perfect opportunity.
The game has been treated to a temporary 30% discount on the Nintendo eShop, taking its price down from £13.49 to £9.44, and a free demo is also available so you can give it a try before you buy. We really enjoyed this one when we played it for review – here’s a snippet of what we had to say:
The Nintendo eShop would be a considerably more exciting and interesting place if it were packed full of games like Ape Out, it’s a refreshingly original experience that more than deserves a place in any Switch owner’s library. Difficult, frenetic gameplay, a strong art direction, and an even stronger jazz drum soundtrack make this the sort of memorable game that you’ll likely keep coming back to over and over for another few runs at the arcade mode.
Have you played the game? Would you recommend it to other Nintendo Life readers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 03:42 AM - Forum: Windows
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Caesars Entertainment bets on the Microsoft cloud
Today’s post was written by Les Ottolenghi, executive vice president and chief information officer at Caesars Entertainment.
The gaming and entertainment industry is at a pivotal moment in its history, as traditional forms of entertainment face wholesale disruption in a hyper-connected world. I joined Caesars Entertainment in January 2016 to help navigate our way to becoming a purely digital business so that we can enhance the guest experience across our enterprise, which includes 55 destinations. Customers—habituated to mobile devices and omnichannel experiences—now expect their entertainment to be digital, real-time, and reliable. Caesars is using Microsoft cloud technologies, from the Office 365 suite of products to Azure and Dynamics 365, as a key part of its strategy to apply digital technology to the casino gaming industry.
Microsoft cloud technologies accelerate our business, from delivering new entertainment options to mobilizing and taking care of customers and our team members. Agility is a key benefit as we strive to stay ahead in a connected world that’s always evolving. With Office 365, we gained a modern workplace that improves efficiency in intelligent ways that map to our business strategies. For example, the dissemination of information and real-time connections among employees who are using Office 365 facilitates the teamwork that’s required to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our IT team can also use Microsoft technologies to deploy these capabilities to the enterprise more seamlessly than ever. As part of our Microsoft cloud rollout, we deployed a text message bot that was built on the Microsoft Azure Bot Service framework to answer users’ questions about the rollout to aid in change management. Thanks to the pilot, the IT team not only gained experience in the design and development of the bots, but overall, the rollout was more successful across the enterprise.
Office 365 business productivity tools are exceptional, up to date, compliant, highly secure, and resilient so that IT can invest in exploring new technology opportunities. With built-in security services and other integrations, IT is free to focus on customer-facing initiatives—more than 60 percent of IT projects are now aimed at delivering value for customers and our team members, which is a huge increase from past years. And as we build digital technology into everything we do, we transform from a brick and mortar to a platform business that delivers what our customers want—before our competitors.
Recently, Caesars launched an interactive and immersive gaming and entertainment environment inside The LINQ Hotel + Experience on the Las Vegas Strip. At the RE:MATCH bar inside The LINQ screens around the bar offer interactive digital experiences, including games on the bar top and one-of-a-kind, immersive digital art installations. Across the casino floor at The Book, customers can fire up an Xbox and play casual games, and they can compete in e-sports events next door. All this translates into a unique experience for our guests that is available all day, every day. To facilitate coordination among the more than 200 people who worked on the project, we used Office 365 to connect the teams and share the information they needed to deliver the experience. It’s a great example of how we’re taking advantage of Microsoft technology to optimize our resources and focus on the customer engagement model.
We are also testing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in Azure to explore real-time, machine learning–based content creation and a deployment model to help us provide customers with what they need, when they need it, whether that be on a screen on a wall or in the palm of their hands. In the future, if a problem at a Los Angeles airport delays a guest’s arrival, we could proactively alleviate their anxiety by sending them an email to reassure them about their reservations or to confirm that we’ll hold their tickets for a big headliner show.
Caesars Entertainment is in the early stages of a global Windows 10 deployment. The continuous release cycles with Windows 10 will satisfy employees who have come to expect constant upgrades on their digital platforms. We’re also focused on making sure that we deliver the right technology into our team members’ hands. Surface Pro has been such a strong product that it has become the device of choice for our executives. And this is where employee satisfaction, which is so important to our culture, comes in. Our team members are more engaged and satisfied with work because they have modern, cloud-powered tools to create connections and improve their productivity. And in a networked world where individuals are vulnerable to cyberattacks and fake information, they know they can still get their work done safely. This is because we use Office 365 with services such as Azure Active Directory and other Microsoft security services, in concert with our security platform and controls, allowing us to geofence sign-in alerts, for example.
As Caesars progresses with its digital transformation, we’re poised to embrace new opportunities in the gaming and hospitality business. Ensuring that our team members are happy and productive with a modern workplace and Microsoft cloud technology is our best bet on getting there.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-24-2019, 03:42 AM - Forum: Windows
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Getting to common terms for data sharing
Sharing data between organizations can help address some of society’s biggest challenges. There is no question that working with data in any fashion requires careful consideration of privacy and security risks, but there are clear benefits to be gained when done appropriately.
For example, a group of research institutions and medical clinics recently came together to create a central data repository of information about patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord, as part of a project called Answer ALS. That dataset can now be used by the same organizations to improve their artificial intelligence research to advance treatments for ALS – more rapidly and with greater efficacy than they could have achieved on their own.
And yet, much of the potential that can be realized through data sharing in similar scenarios remains untapped – in part because the tools for collaboration are often immature or non-existent. Organizations that wish to share data often have to confront the reality of having to spend months or even years negotiating and drawing up contracts to govern data sharing arrangements, for example, which can be a time consuming, expensive and laborious process.
Many people and organizations are doing great work to tackle this problem. There are many data use agreements and resources readily available through an Internet search. We’ve created a set of links to many of them here.
At the same time, we think there is an opportunity to do more. We want to help make it easier for individuals and organizations that want to share data to do so. Often, agreements for broad data sharing scenarios are unnecessarily long and complex. We also think there is an important role for agreements that limit rights to computational use for AI. Further, we think the state of the art on data sharing for proprietary and private data sets is changing rapidly and the terms available publicly could be improved and better explained.
We’ve developed three data use agreements for community review and input. We have drawn from precursors, but are also advancing some new thinking drawn from our own experiences in working on data sharing projects. Hopefully you will see some of this experience come through, particularly in the annotations.
Going forward, our aim is to work with interested stakeholders to improve these agreements and to offer additional ones that cover a wide range of data sharing scenarios. Please take a look at the initial drafts and let us know what you think!
Data innovation is a complex topic, but we should work together to make the terms used more streamlined and defined. We hope these drafts are a step in this direction.
The gaming and entertainment industry is at a pivotal moment in its history, as traditional forms of entertainment face wholesale disruption in a hyper-connected world. I joined Caesars Entertainment in January 2016 to help navigate our way to becoming a purely digital business so that we can enhance the guest experience across our enterprise, which includes 55 destinations. Customers—habituated to mobile devices and omnichannel experiences—now expect their entertainment to be digital, real-time, and reliable. Caesars is using Microsoft cloud technologies, from the Office 365 suite of products to Azure and Dynamics 365, as a key part of its strategy to apply digital technology to the casino gaming industry.
