2018-10-26

2018-10-26

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eSports Sector Receives Major Investments: Nike Signs its First eSport Ambassador and Investments Made by Drake and Michael Jordan 

For the first time ever, sportswear company Nike signed its first esports ambassador, a 21-year-old League of Legends star named Jian ‘Uzi’ Zihao.  Michael Jordan has become the latest athlete to invest in esports after it was announced Thursday morning that the NBA Hall of Famer is investing in Team Liquid parent company, aXiomatic esports, along with investment group Declaration Capital.  100 Thieves, which sponsors teams and sells lifestyle apparel, raised Series A, Drake and Scooter Braun join as Co-Owners.   

 

League of Legends Catches Cheaters by Making Bots Fight Each Other 

According to Riot, there are three primary types of cheaters In League of Legends: scripters, who automate actions; boosters, who acquire highly ranked accounts; and botters, who use programs to help them level up.  In the last three years Riot has banned over 7 million accounts for scripting alone.    To combat the cheaters, League of Legends has an anti-cheat team that is composed of analysts, data scientists, and even ex-cheaters who come together to identify ways of deterring, preventing, and detecting exploits. 

The most innovative anti-cheat method that Riot employs involves bots.   “We’ve got a few PhD candidates, and those nerds are actively whipping up machine models that sort the electric dishwashers from the humans,” Riot wrote in a recent blog post. “Bots fighting bots—real edge-of-your-seat stuff.” 

 

Battlefield 5’s Battle Royale Mode Will Arrive at Least 4 months After the Game Launches 

Everybody’s coming to the battle royale party, but it looks Battlefield 5 will arrive fashionably late. An update on the game’s official website detailing the first three “chapters” of the Tides of War campaign has confirmed that Firestorm mode, which airdrops 64 players into a huge map being steadily consumed by a ring of fire, will arrive in spring 2019. As a reminder, Tides of War is what EA’s calling Battlefield 5’s free, season-based post-launch support model.
 

Epic Would Really Like You to Stop Calling the New Fortnite Monsters ‘Zombies’ 

Zombies don’t exist in Fortnite.  But Fortnite’s Halloween festival named Fortnitemare does have monstrous-looking ghouls.  They look like zombies but are officially known as “Cube Monsters”.   Yeah, but most players definitely assume these “Cube Monsters” are zombies.