Technology - Google News

Overwatch Nerf Line Reveals First Gun
Lessons Learned From Fortnite's Ugly Summer Skirmish Winner Witch Hunt
China Targets Apple With Push Into Advanced Smartphone Screens

Posted: 21 Jul 2018 09:22 AM PDT

Too bad the first gun in the Overwatch Nerf line wasn't revealed to be a D.Va weapon, because then we could say "NERF this!" and her voice line would make sense. Still, "Reaper here" in a grizzly voice has its own appeal, and the phrase "die, die, die" will be pretty much everywhere.

During this year's San Diego Comic Con experience, Blizzard and Nerf came armed and ready to rock with the official reveal of the new line. Pictured below, the gun itself is functional (with the appropriate ammo, come on), equipped with sounds and special edition bullets. It even has the Overwatch logo on it, though the Black Watch hero himself probably wouldn't approve.

reaper overwatch gun — (Photo: Blizzard)

The new gun isn't available to buy just yet, but it will be arriving sometime in 2019 alongside others that have yet to be revealed. I know I'm holding my breath here, but if I could get a Lucio blaster, that'd be great.

Special shout out to trio-trile on Tumblr for the epic art for Reaper's Buy, Buy, Buy!

Overwatch is now available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. To learn more about the anti-hero himself, here's what Blizzard had to say:

Some speak of a black-robed terrorist known only as the Reaper. His identity and motives are a mystery. What is known is that where he appears, death follows.

The Reaper is an extremely volatile mercenary, a ruthless and remorseless killer responsible for terrorist attacks across the world. He has fought in many armed conflicts in the last decades, showing no loyalty to any cause or organization.

1comments

Survivors have described a black shadow ghosting unscathed through the most hellish battlefields. The few bodies recovered of those he kills are pale, empty husks drained of life, their cells showing signs of intense degradation. It is possible that he is a byproduct of failed genetic alteration which forces his cells to simultaneously decay and regenerate at a hyper-accelerated rate.

Those attempting to track his movements have begun to see a pattern in his appearances. They believe that Reaper is hunting former Overwatch agents and systematically eliminating them.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Lessons Learned From Fortnite's Ugly Summer Skirmish Winner Witch Hunt

Posted: 22 Jul 2018 06:19 AM PDT

FortniteEpic

Fortnite’s second Summer Skirmish event is over, and it was a new kind of mess, one that ended up being a rather ugly affair thanks to a mob-based witch hunt of the winner, but a situation that wasn’t helped by Epic’s tournament set-up in the first place.

The controversy centered on idropz_bodies, a relatively unknown player who rose to the top of the heap on day one, putting up huge kill totals and a number of wins to best a number of much more famous and well-known streamers and players.

The main problem? Idropz_bodies wasn’t streaming his gameplay. This fact, plus his relatively unknown status, plus players trying to look up his past stats online, resulted in a conclusion by the hundreds-of-thousands-strong viewerbase: Idropz must be cheating.

Players said that Idropz was using a mouse and keyboard on PS4, something that is technically legal but would give him an unfair advantage. They said he was being fed kills by friendly players joining his games at the exact same time, friends who were creating brand new accounts for this express purpose.

And yet, none of this was true, at least according to Epic, who has done a thorough investigation of Idropz’s games, something that seemed somewhat mandatory as he did walk away with $130,000 in prize money between his first place finish and his kill bonus awards.

The final standingsEpic

Epic came to the conclusion that no, Idropz:

Was not playing with a mouse and keyboard on PS4
Was not playing way, way better than usual as stat tracking sites are not the most reliable for that kind of info
Was not leaving the lobby multiple times for better bus spawns
Was not killing the same people over and over in different games, implying he was being fed
Was not killing brand new accounts

In short, literally nothing anyone had said about idropz was true. He was just…a really good PS4 player having a really solid stretch of ten games to place first in this tournament. And he’s not as “out of nowhere” as fans were assuming, he was actually a talented Destiny 1 PvP player, and during the debacle, many old Destiny players were coming to his defense.

Many fans behaved extremely poorly in this whole situation. This is another “reddit detective” moment where supposed “researched proof” turned out to be overstated or nothing at all, smearing a solid player who had put up an incredible performance. While sure, I wondered if something weird was going on too for a while, there’s a difference between say, asking Epic to check into things and spamming IDROPZ CHEATED a thousand times in Twitch chat or writing 4,000 word reddit screeds declaring a “criminal act” occurred during the event, essentially accusing the kid of stealing $130,000 in some sort of elaborate heist. This was mob mentality and a disregard for “innocent until proven guilty” at its worst.

FortniteEpic

And yet I don’t think Epic was entirely blameless in this. The fact that you could even have a million dollar esports event and not require all the participants to stream is ludicrous. In this case, it was like being told a random player you’ve never heard of just put up a 100 point NBA game, yet you never actually saw him do it. I know the rationale is that you can’t stream delay on PS4, which is why streaming isn’t a requirement there, but still, there has to be a workaround for this. And even if idropz was not using a mouse and keyboard, after all this, Epic has come out to say that it’s perfectly fine if you do that on console, in an effort to promote “accessibility” for the game. This is a huge mistake and could backfire horribly if all pros switch to PS4/mouse keyboard to start farming easy console kills, which very well could happen if Epic lets this stand.

Past this, I think Epic needs to do some serious research into the console/PC split of performance. In Summer Showdown, almost all the top point-getters in those fan events were playing on console where it seems to be easier to secure high kill totals and wins. And here in these events, we have two of the top three finishers on night one playing on PS4, when the vast, vast majority of the pool was playing on PC. I’m not sure about night two, but again, I do think this is something that needs to be looked into, and so far, Epic hasn’t done that.

This was just a bad situation all around. Idropz was unfairly crucified by fans who should have waited to see what the truth was before jumping to conclusions. And yet this entire situation could have probably been avoided in the first place if he had been streaming/showing his set-up the entire time, which seems like a pretty basic rule for an event with $1 million in prizes on the line.

Hopefully everyone has learned a few things from this mess, and we don’t see something like this happen again. But we’ll see.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pre-order my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

China Targets Apple With Push Into Advanced Smartphone Screens

Posted: 22 Jul 2018 05:03 AM PDT

BOE Technology Group is seeking to supply advanced OLED screens for Apple’s high-end iPhones. Shown, a fully automated BOE assembly line in Chongqing, China, in 2016. Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News

Yoko Kubota

The Wall Street Journal

Biography
@Kubota_Yoko
yoko.kubota@wsj.com

Updated July 22, 2018 8:17 a.m. ET

16 COMMENTS

CHENGDU, China—China’s campaign to become a global power in advanced manufacturing is playing out at a high-tech factory in the Sichuan province, where engineers are aiming to supply display screens for Apple Inc.’s AAPL -0.23% top-tier iPhones.

BOE Technology Group Co. plants already make display screens for Apple’s iPads and MacBook computers, and the company is also the world’s top producer of large liquid crystal screens. Now it is seeking to supply Apple with advanced organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, smartphone screens, according to people familiar with the plans.

If it succeeds, BOE will not only prove its manufacturing prowess with a technically challenging product, but also will score a big win for China in its race to catch up to South Korea and Japan in advanced display-screen manufacturing.

“Many years ago, people were saying that no, the China guys can’t do it. But I think BOE makes a good example,” said David Hsieh, senior director of display research at IHS Markit, a data-analytics company.

BOE, hardly a household name in the U.S., has advanced quickly in the display industry. It became the No. 1 supplier of large LCD screens last year, up from No. 5 in 2014, according to IHS Markit.

It is the only Chinese display company that supplies Apple, which is notoriously finicky in its demands for top-quality components.

But LCD screens are easier to mass-produce than flexible OLED displays, which involve applying tiny organic materials. Even Samsung Electronics Co. , an OLED pioneer and Apple’s primary display provider, has struggled with a high rate of castoffs.

For Apple, landing BOE as an OLED display supplier provides it with an alternative to Samsung, which Apple competes with in smartphones but relies on for the OLED screens. Apple is keen to diversify its suppliers to minimize production risks and ensure price competition, industry analysts say.

Buying display screens from BOE, which is controlled by the Beijing city government and whose biggest shareholders are state-linked companies, could help Apple stay in China’s good graces—as long as BOE can meet Apple’s high bar for quality.

“It would be seen favorably by Chinese policy makers if Apple puts a stamp of good quality for China’s own technology of suppliers,” said Dan Wang, a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.

Apple declined to comment.

China’s industrial policies are one of the factors driving U.S.-China trade tensions, with the White House saying they give Chinese companies unfair advantages.

Inside a BOE Technology TFT-LCD display plant in Beijing. Photo: BOE Technology

BOE’s rapid rise is in part a reflection of those policies, including government financial support for favored industries. But BOE has also grown by tapping foreign talent and a growing pool of competent local engineers.

At four out of five factories that BOE has recently built or is currently building in China for the cutting-edge displays, local governments contributed most of the initial phase of investment, company filings showed.

IHS’s Mr. Hsieh said government backing helps, but BOE also has talented and aggressive engineers, with a type of commitment he says he has found increasingly difficult to find in the more mature industries of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

A case in point is BOE’s approach to Apple.

BOE first knocked on Apple’s doors in about 2011 with hopes of supplying the tech giant with screens, a person familiar with the matter said. It has provided Apple with MacBook displays since 2015 and iPad displays since 2016, the person said.

Apple has been not only a customer but also a teacher to BOE, with its high quality expectations keeping BOE engineers working into late hours. “To improve, one must play chess with the best player,” the person said.

This year, Apple for the first time included BOE on the list of 200 top suppliers it has made public.

Apple began using OLED panels—which are brighter and thinner than traditional panels—in its phones for the first time last year with the release of the iPhone X.

The earliest BOE could supply the OLED screens would be from 2020, one person familiar with the matter said. For iPhones intended for release later this year, Apple is set to procure screens mainly from Samsung, with a small portion coming from LG Display Co. , people have said.

BOE already is supplying OLED screens to Huawei Technologies Co. for the Chinese smartphone maker’s high-end Mate RS and expects more shipments to several major clients later this year, said Zhang Yu, BOE’s senior vice president, declining to name the clients. Huawei didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Making OLED screens is hard: It involves handling tiny compounds smaller than human hair and applying them in exactly the right spot, or else colors appear distorted on the screen. Those compounds, which emit red, blue and green colors on the panel, must be applied through a mask with holes 17 to 25 microns big, according to BOE engineer Cui Fuyi. That’s about one-third the width of a human hair.

After months of trials, the current production yield at Chengdu is around 70%, said Mr. Zhang. Industry experts say that is close to a level where a steady mass production would be feasible.

—Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

Let's block ads! (Why?)