OwnedCore Report #28

**Kenneth** · 07-01-2018

Welcome to our 28th report. This week talks about Fortnite's rocket launch, Hearthstone ranked system being updated, PUBG lawsuit ending, and more. If you didn't see last weeks you can do so by clicking HERE. We had an interview with Hazzbazzy about WoW exploring.

Gaming news from the Globe

PUBG Drops Suit against Epic Games

So PUBG talked about suing Fortnite all the way back in Fall of 2017. Well in their South Korean department a suit was filed about a month ago. Things such as the feature of 100 players dropping into a hunger games BR and the compass across the top of the screen made PUBG developers feel they had their ideas taken. But like we've covered before there have been tons of innovative BR's before PUBG such as H1Z1. Well PUBG dropped the suit. It is unclear if there was a settlement of PUBG abandoned the case. I personally think that PUBG saw Epics addition of a BR to Fortnite only 6 months after PUBG came out on Unreal 4, which Epic owns, as a major threat.

The History of WoW in one video

With the 14th anniversary of WoW coming up and the new expansion even closer, Ion and developers such as Patrick Magruder and Jimmy lo delve into the history of WoW. The video, about an hour long, covers WoW's history throughout all the expansions starting with Vanilla all the way to Legion. Updates that occurred and additions such as the WoW token and tmog were also talked about. Ironically this video reminds me of the 10th anniversary that came out only four years ago which was a little bit more documentary-like.

Fortnite Rocket Launch + a Solo Kill Record

So a lot happened this weekend with Fortnite and it all started with an announcement that on Saturday you could witness a rocket go off in game at a specific time depending on where you're from. But let me paint a picture for you to explain what is going on. Fortnite tells a "story" through their map and seasons and right now we are at the end of Season 4 which is super hero themed. Throughout the season we have seen the addition of secret villain lairs, space rocks, and a rocket. Well that rocket finally was going off and clearly it is playing into what is going to happen next season. So that rocket goes off Saturday and the whole community is making a "truce" via a ton of websites including reddit to not kill each other during the only match they can see the rocket go off in. From what I have gathered it was going well and there are now a ton of videos of this rocket launch all over Youtube. But with anything there are bad apples. One of them named Elemental_Ray decided to use this as an opportunity to get a lot of kills at once. In Wailing Woods a lot of people built a ramp really high up about 10 rows deep to witness the rocket together. Well Elemental_Ray decided to grief the viewers mid rocket event and took out the bottom of the ramp and with that 48 people including himself fell to their death. Meaning almost half the lobby was on this one ramp system. Also this gave Elemental_Ray the solo kill record which was in the 30s before done legit but now sits at 48 for Elemental_Ray the evil genius.

A video can be seen here:

Now with this rocket came theories. People are speculating that a recent skin that came out called Vertex had something to do with this rocket creating a time warp in the sky, some people think the time warp is going to bring the past into the future, and many more. Some leaks show detective skins coming out so I assume they are going to be "looking into" what went wrong with the rocket. Season 5 is coming out in about 2 weeks so there will probably be a lot of changes to the map to tell the story of what will be the new theme for Season 5.

Hearthstone Legend Rank system revamp

So if you are a skilled player in Hearthstone you might have recently noticed that if the Legend ranked system has been very weird lately. Queuing into matches against a ton of unranked Legend players sometimes not even close to Legend, Losing ranks when winning, and only gaining 10 paltry when winning and losing 100 on a loss. Well all of this made it nearly impossible to not only rank up further but even sit at your current legend rank because it required a unreasonable win rate. Blizzard has stated that this goes back to a change made all the way back in February which was the last matchmaking change. This change included making Legend players start new seasons at rank 4 which created a massive influx of Legend players. So Blizzard is saying this is the cause of the issue and is fixing it in July.

Some players have raised concerns that matchmaking at Legend ranks isn?t working properly. Please rest assured that we have not changed the matchmaking calculations since our 10.2 Update. However, the Ranked Play update from 10.2 resulted in an increased number of people reaching Legend, and their matchmaking values are much closer together.

With a tighter distribution of matchmaking ratings, losing games at lower Legend ranks can result in a matchmaking rating significantly worse than non-Legend players. Once a Legend player has a low matchmaking rating, it can become difficult to gain ranks.

Ranked Play is very important to us, and we?ve been watching this situation very closely as it has evolved since March. To help improve the Legend rank experience, we are changing how Legend players get matched against non-Legend players starting with our July Ranked Play Season. With that change, Legend players will have to lose significantly more games before matching against a non-Legend player.

Additional changes to Ranked Play will be coming later this year, and those should also improve the experience. We?ll provide more details when those features are closer to release.