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League of Legends game director Pu Liu has confirmed that not only does Riot have the capabilities to increase detection of soft inting, but it’s also looking at ways to punish transgressors. 

Soft inting is apparently “a large problem in the game,” Liu tweets as part of his announcement. This term covers players who don’t lose games on purpose but don’t contribute to a win. Instead of interacting with other players in a team fight or the objective, they tend to farm sidelanes and just generally switch off focus. Players can do this for various reasons. It may be that someone on their team made them angry, so they want to stop them from winning, or they just give up too quickly and can’t be bothered to try for the rest of the match. 

It can be hard to distinguish between players who are soft inting and those who are just not very good at the game, but the higher up the elos you climb, the more obvious it can become. This is why it was previously hard to ban accounts for soft inting as Riot’s security software Vanguard couldn’t distinguish between genuine players and soft inters. However, it looks like this is about to change.

“Now that we have machine…

The Fallout TV show is continuing to have an impressive ripple effect on its source material. Last week saw Fallout 76 hit its highest-ever concurrent player count on Steam, while Fallout Shelter saw a humble bump in player count and revenue. Unsurprisingly, the game reaping the biggest benefits from the show’s success is Fallout 4. Despite it being almost nine years old at this point, it’s technically the most recent mainline entry—one which was one of the most-played games on Steam this weekend.

The game’s been slowly climbing in concurrents this week, according to SteamDB, before peaking at a respectable 164,190 simultaneous Sole Survivors exploring the Wasteland on Sunday. It was the ninth most-played game on Steam, raking in more folk than Rainbow Six Siege, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Lost Ark. It’s also approximately 140,000 more concurrent players than Fallout 4 had prior to the TV show’s debut which, even without it topping the charts, is a significant number on its own.

Just what were more people playing than Fallout 4, you might ask? Well, it was narrowly beaten out by Stardew Valley—which had a peak of 177,618 over the weekend—followed …

Asus unveiled its first ROG NUC back at CES 2024. We got a look of the unit itself along with some launch specifications, but pricing and a release date were not revealed. We now have a pretty good idea of both thanks to a pre-order listing at European retailer Proshop (via NotebookCheck).

The listing reveals a launch price of €2,500. That’s for the high end version which comes with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU and RTX 4070 laptop GPU. This SKU comes with 2x16GB of DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD. Proshop’s listing indicates a release date of April 10. 

€2,500 is a lot of money. At that price it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing this configuration topping bestseller lists. Thankfully, there’s at least one more affordable version coming. According to Asus’ product page, a variant with a Core Ultra 7 155H processor and RTX 4060 graphics will be available too.

As a dedicated fan of small form factor PCs, I’d be happy to own a ROG NUC, even if the €2,500 price makes it a tough purchase when you could build your own mini-ITX PC for a lot less. 

Price aside, the 2.5L ROG NUC looks like an impressive little piece of kit. The specs of the unit aren’…

Remember the whole GameStop stonks thing from a couple years ago? It’s kind of complicated and kind of stupid, and frankly I don’t think anyone is entirely sure exactly what happened, but the bottom line is that a guy on Reddit started talking about GameStop stocks, then Elon Musk tweeted about it, then everyone went nuts, and then—for a brief while—profit. The whole thing had a certain Wolf of Wall Street vibe to it (except that the wolf in this case was Roaring Kitty) and sure enough, work to bring the tale to film was soon underway.

Today Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled the first trailer for its contribution to that cinematic effort: A flick called Dumb Money, “the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world’s hottest company.”

“In the middle of everything is regular guy Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the stock and posting about it,” the YouTube listing states. “When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a moveme…

The untimely death of Lance Reddick in 2023 was felt throughout the entertainment world. For Destiny 2 fans, the loss was especially acute: Reddick had provided the voice of Commander Zavala, Vanguard Commander of the Last City, since the release of the original Destiny in 2014. The character’s fate in the wake of Reddick’s passing was unclear at first, but Bungie opted to keep him around, with Keith David, another widely-respected character actor, stepping in to fill the role.

Eight months after David’s casting announcement, we’ve finally got our first look—or, more appropriately, listen—at his take on the character, and I have to say, it hits the spot.

I’m a very lapsed Destiny 2 player but even so, this clip lands just right. It’s Zavala—a little more gravelly, maybe a bit deeper, but with inflection and intonation close enough to the original that I don’t come away feeling like Bungie hired an imitator, they hired a new Zavala to carry on the role. And even though it’s not a reference to Reddick, the fact that Bungie chose this particular quote for David’s debut really comes off as a touching homage. 

The reaction from fans is widely …