Battlefield V is doing away with its premium pass in favor of Tides of War, a new live-services system which seems will only allow in-game currency bought with real money to be spent on cosmetic upgrades.

This decision makes a lot of sense considering the massive backlash around Star Wars: Battlefront II’s loot box system, which lead to outcry over the game’s progression system and virtual currency economy.

As detailed in a blog post, Battlefield V developer DICE explains how Tides of War will work. In terms of game economy, there will be two types of currency: “Company Coin” and a currency which can be bought with real money called “Battlefield Currency”. 

Company Coin can be used to buy skill tree upgrades and new gear, while Battlefield currency can only be used to purchase cosmetic upgrades. 

It’s worth noting that Battlefield Currency won’t be available at launch, with the post going on to explain how first players need “to get hands-on experience with their Company, the progression system, and earning Company Coin before introducing premium currency”.  

“Battlefield V is made to reward how often you play and how well you play,” the post continues. “You will never be able to use Battlefield Currency or spend real-world money to get anything that gives you an unfair gameplay advantage.”

It seems DICE is hoping that allowing players to spend real money on cosmetics alone should avoid this issue of pay-to-win, but its not clear if other aspects of the monetization system will arise come launch day. 

Starting at 6:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Alpha Ring will begin receiving a new 1811 Xbox One system update (181019-1520). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1811 system update.

Fixes:

Home

• USB Keyboard navigation fixes to resolve navigation issues on the console.

 System

• Addressed the system Out of Box Experience to set the features of Dolby Vision, Variable Refresh rate and low latency modes when enabling 4k mode.
• Stability fixes in this build.

Known Issues:

Avatars

• It can take up to 10 seconds to view an Avatar on the profile screen after creating a new Avatar.

 My Games and Apps

• We are tracking an issue in which game and app updates are not automatically downloading and installing.

 Power

• We are tracking an issue in which the console is fully powering off when it is placed into Instant On mode.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

If there’s one thing that’s historically saturated the internet, it’s horror stuff. More specifically, the entire subgenre known as creepypasta, a style of story that is infamously cliché and poorly written to the point that it’s actually quite amusing.

So in the name of Halloween, snuggle up and dim the lights as you watch the video above, featuring the definitely real Grimwald Gutfright, as he conglomerates all these stories into one for your temporary amusement.

No Way Out – A Dead Realm Tale is Now Available on Steam!

No Way Out: A Dead Realm Tale is a chilling VR experience that takes you to hell and back! Race against the clock as you solve puzzles in this haunted mansion caught between our world and the Dead Realm. Will you escape? Or will you become just another lost soul trapped forever in Huxley’s Mansion?

It’s a very spooky day today, zombies everywhere, bats flapping around… It must be october 31st, Halloween! Man, can you imagine if it were also friday the 13th? That’d be truly scary. Here at Mojang, we celebrate halloween in style: with snapshots! And this weeks snapshot is another doozy! New cats! New blocks! Lots of new blocks! Keeping in the spooky theme of the day, though, we’ve not added any new functionality to the new blocks contained within this snapshot. How fiendish of the developers! What could they possibly be for? We may never find out… At least not today.

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Split cats and ocelots to their own creatures and updated cats with new features!
• Added lots of new blocks!
• You can now right click on signs with dyes to change the text color
• Lots of performance improvements, especially to client stuttering!
• Added “Programmer Art” in the resource pack menu: it’s the old textures, easy to use!

CAT AND OCELOT SPLIT

• Stray cats can be tamed
• Tamed cats can give lovely (or less lovely) morning gifts to their owners
• Ocelots can’t be tamed, but they might start trusting you if you feed them with fish
• Phantoms are terribly scared of cats – how convenient!
• Cat collars can now be dyed
• Added several new cat skins!

NEW BLOCKS

Even more! Can you believe it?!

All of these blocks currently have no functionality and are only available in the creative inventory. This will change really soon, we just wanted to get the actual blocks themselves out there as soon as we could! They might also change visually, too!

• Added Barrel
• Added Smoker
• Added Blast Furnace
• Added Cartography Table
• Added Fletching Table
• Added Grindstone
• Added Lectern
• Added Smithing Table
• Added Stonecutter
• Added Bell

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

She has a staggering 660 million online users. And, while they know she’s not real, many prize her as a dear friend, even a trusted confidante. Sometimes the line between fact and fantasy blurs. She gets love letters and gifts. And not too long ago, a group of fans asked her out to dinner and even ordered an extra meal – just in case she showed up.

She is Xiaoice – Microsoft’s chatbot phenomenon that has enthralled digital audiences across the world’s most populous nation for the past four years.

Her popularity is such that she ranks among China’s most admired celebrities. And, her talents appear to have no bounds: She is a poet, a painter, a TV presenter, a news pundit, and a lot more.

Sometimes sweet, sometimes sassy and always streetwise, this virtual teenager has her own opinions and steadfastly acts like no other bot. She doesn’t try to answer every question posed by a user. And, she’s loathed to follow their commands. Instead, her conversations with her often adoring users are peppered with wry remarks, jokes, empathic advice on life and love, and a few simple words of encouragement.

Herein lies the secret of her success: She is learning, with increasing success, to relate and interact with humans through nuance, social skills, and, importantly, emotions.

But that’s just part of the story. “Xiaoice the chatbot” is just a small part a massive and multi-dimensional artificial intelligence (AI) framework, which continuously uses deep learning techniques to soak up the types of data that build up her emotional intelligence (EQ). She is using her interactions with humans to acquire human social skills, behavior, and knowhow. In other words, she is learning to be more like “us” every day.

“This is what we call an Empathic Computing Framework,” explains Di Li, Microsoft’s general manager for Xiaoice in Microsoft’s Software and Technology Center of Asia. “To create an AI framework, you need to choose EQ or IQ, or EQ plus IQ”.

“And, if you want to choose EQ plus IQ, you must choose which one to do first. When we started with Xiaoice, we chose to do the EQ first and the IQ later.”

Every interaction a chatbot has with a human produces data. AI systems use this data to build that bot’s capabilities. The more data a machine has, the more it learns and the more it can do.

When they started, Di Li and his team in China did what other chatbot designers were not doing. When they launched the Xiaoice project, they deliberately discarded data that was based on user requests for facts and figures or commands to do simple tasks. Instead, they homed in on data that would help build a “personality” that would attract and engage users.

“Xiaoice wasn’t initially built to tell you how high the Himalayas are or to turn your house lights on. In the beginning, some users didn’t like that. But we soon found that many others stayed around and started treating her like a social entity.”

”With her attempts to interact, they made emotional connections. This kind of data is very valuable for us. They treat Xiaoice as if she were human, like a friend, which was a goal.”

From there she has never looked back. Almost every day, her legions of fans and friends across China send her cards and gifts – so much so that the team have set aside a whole office at their Beijing lab to display many of these tokens of affection and even declarations of “love”.

Originally, her character was to be that of a 16-year-old. But her creators raised that to 18 once her capabilities increased and she started taking on new “jobs”. Since then, her fans have voted that she stay 18 forever. “She won’t grow older. Eighteen is the age many of us want to be,” explains Di Li.

The depth of feeling generated by Xiaoice across her fan base is surprising. Social media shows that people seek her advice on all sorts of personal issues. “They tell her about their family, their job, their health, their boyfriends or girlfriends,” says Di Li. “It can get very personal.”

Some users can spend hours talking with Xiaoice. Others just follow their imaginations. Recently, a group of five students once went to a restaurant and ordered for six in the hope that Xiaoice would come too.

But there is a serious side to this. Microsoft’s research and work on the Xiaoice project has generated serious and important progress on a much wider front that points to where we’re are heading with computing. Xiaoice as “a friend chatbot,” represents is just a small slither of what the AI framework is achieving. Its base of knowledge and skill is also increasing across multiple sectors and tasks.

We were just as sceptical as you guys were when we first heard about the existence of Command & Conquer: Rivals. It IS a pretty cynical use of a much loved franchise that hasn’t had a decent try in years, after all.

At the same time, looking at what we’ve seen so far (including Dan’s hands-on time with the game at E3), I still think there’s room for Rivals to surprise us all. Plenty of people who’ve actually played the game have suggested that it’s actually pretty decent. Behind the abused license seem to lurk a paced, deep tactics game that just wants to be given a chance.

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Which you can do come December 4th, when the game releases worldwide on both iOS and Android devices.

As EA themselves point out, this isn’t a “drop-and-watch” game like other competitive strategy tiles on mobile. You do have control of your units through all stages of a match. EA are also pretty serious about making this a major mobile title for them, as indicated by their yearly earnings report:

It will also be our next official EA competitive gaming franchise, with a complete ecosystem beginning to roll out in Q4, including community tournaments and a championship pro scene. This is a fast-paced, head-to-head strategy game that is easy to play, a lot of fun, and perfect for competitive play. We’ve had great engagement and feedback in our soft-launch testing, and strong interest from competitive players. This is our first entry into mobile esports, and we’re excited for Command & Conquer: Rivals to expand our global audience of players and spectators.

What is currently unknown, and what we’ll be looking closely at, is the monetisation systems. EA have a bad reputation in this space, and I doubt their overall strategy will shift dramatically for Rivals, but if we’re lucky, it may be just enough to make it worth-while. The influences of games like Fortnite also can’t be ignored, which subsist largely on cosmetic DLC – proof, of sorts, that you don’t need to resort to pay-to-win to engage your player base.

You can go to the official website if you want to try and get in on the pre-release activity on iOS, and on Android you can just register directly on the Google Play store.

Command & Conquer Rivals will release world-wide on iOS and Android December 4th, 2018.

The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) All Member Meeting takes place bi-annually and brings the AGL community together to learn about the latest developments, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry.

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Skype is designed to keep you connected to the people who matter the most and help you do the work you need to do. We take your feedback very seriously and are grateful to our active accessibility community who point us to areas of improvement to live up to our vision. Building on the work we announced earlier this year, we’ve been listening to your feedback and have continued to work to make the latest version of Skype (version 8.0) even more accessible.

Based off your suggestion to make the transition to the new version easier, we created the Accessibility support for Skype page with details on how to easily use a screen reader to move from Skype version 6 or 7 to Skype version 8.0. The page also demonstrates keyboard shortcuts for Skype version 8.0, as well as how to complete key scenarios in Skype with a screen reader, including chat, adding expressions, and navigating a profile.

In addition, since our last update on accessibility, we made a few more improvements to the latest version of Skype, including:

• Focus assist, which announces when you receive an incoming call for keyboard only and screen reader users.
• Screen reader announcements from users in the active call list.
• Navigational focus announcements within the contact list and settings to improve flow.
• Announcing the name, content, and actions of a pop up dialog.
• New message announcements when users are in another chat.
• Smoother navigation that takes a more natural left-to-right and top-to-bottom path.
• Displaying additional information when sending and receiving messages. For example, Skype now announces when messages are sent and when messages you attempt to send have failed.

We are committed to continually improving our software and services to meet the needs of all our customers. Please share your thoughts and ideas via the Microsoft Accessibility UserVoice or contact the Disability Answer Desk for real-time support via phone, chat, or ASL videophone—your feedback is always appreciated. If you are an early adopter—and comfortable with early preview releases—please consider joining the Skype Insider community.