Monday
Apr302018

Valve will delay release of ‘Dota 2’ patches during major tournaments

Hoping to avoid wreaking havoc on professional players who compete in Dota 2 tournaments, Valve has just announced that its rapid-fire, two-week patch schedule will be delayed when it coincides with a major esports tournament. A recent update affected players who were part of the Epicenter XL tournament and gave them less than a day to adapt to significant gameplay changes.

This isn’t the case with other games used in esports as they keep separate tournament modes that are a step or two behind the regular game to give players enough time to practice with the game. It’s a tricky balance for developers as they try to make sure to appease both regular gamers get to enjoy new tweaks and additions and the pro gamers who need a bit more consistency.

Source: Engadget

Monday
Apr302018

Facebook hopes you wouldn’t notice fake news by shrinking links to them

Facebook is continuing its battle against fake news and its latest attempt is lessening the “visual prominence” of these false stories on your timeline. At the same time, the social network will be giving an accurate story more attention with larger images and bolder text. How is the company able to weed out the fake news? Facebook is making use of machine learning to help with its fact checking. It’ll scan new articles for any false claims and prioritizes the suspicious ones for the company’s human reviewers to handle. This move will not only help them save time but also help them catch the fake news easily. While we don’t know the efficacy of this new approach, it does, as Engadget points out, shows that it’s trying to balance being able to fight fake news and avoid more controversy but at the same time not block content unless they really need to.

Monday
Apr302018

Twitter groups and highlights news links your friends share

You might notice some new changes to your Twitter timeline soon as the social network continues to work on being your go-to source for current events. Its latest update highlights the news links your friends tweet and groups them together right in your timeline. Buzzfeed News first shared this new feature and Twitter confirmed with Engadget that this update is rolling out to Android, iOS, and web versions. Whether this is just being tested or is already rolling out to the general public isn’t clear yet. We haven’t seen it yet on our feed but do let us know your thoughts if you spot it and let us know if you like this new change or not.

Saturday
Apr282018

Canadian Reviewer Weekly Roundup 4/22-4/28