Author: Kyle Orland

File this in the "department of unintended consequences." Blizzard has announced that it is removing the "Avoid this player" feature from online shooter Overwatch, partly because it was isolating players that opponents thought were playing too well.

In an announcement earlier today, Blizzard said the Prefer/Avoid player feature system "was designed with the best intentions; however, it's not currently performing in a way that we feel is healthy for the game." While the ability to note that you prefer beneficial players is working as intended, the ability to avoid "problem" players "has impacted the matchmaker in [a] negative way and led to some very poor player experiences."

Game Director Jeff Kaplan went into much more detail on the change (and matchmaking in general) in a long post about the matter yesterday. The following anecdote about what happened to a highly skilled Widowmaker player explains the situation beautifully, so we'll just quote it here in full:

Here at Ars Technica, we're used to crowdfunded projects failing to live up to expectations. Even by the standards of Kickstarter projects, though, this week's release of Mighty No. 9 is becoming a case study in launch debacles.

The full list of problems is quite lengthy, and middling to awful reviews for the game itself are just the start of it. Many backers and watchers began to worry last month when a tone-deaf, borderline insulting trailer showed a game with graphics reminiscent of those fan-made Net Yaroze games on the old PlayStation Underground discs.

A Eurogamer comparison video this week demonstrates that the final game looks markedly worse than the "evaluation test" showed to attract Kickstarter backers roughly three years ago. Considering the test footage reportedly took seven days to create and didn't have millions of crowdfunding dollars behind it yet, the difference is a bit baffling.

We've been hearing for years how mobile gaming has been growing at nearly inconceivable rates and will soon become the dominant force in the gaming business. Today's $10-billion purchase of Clash of Clans maker Supercell by Chinese gaming giant Tencent drives home just how big that shift is—or at least how big the market thinks it is.

Tencent paid $8.57 billion for about 84 percent of the Finnish Supercell (which is owned by Japanese parent Softbank), valuing the mobile game studio at about $10.2 billion. That means a mobile game company with four titles is now worth more than twice as much as both Minecraft-maker Mojang (acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion) and VR company Oculus (acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion) combined. Looking outside of gaming, Supercell sold for nearly twice as much as the combined purchase price of both YouTube and LucasFilm.

The only gaming acquisition that even comes close to the size of the Supercell deal is Activision's purchase of Candy Crush Saga maker King, another mobile-focused studio. That move represented a $5.9-billion bet that franchises like Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Destiny aren't going to be enough to sustain growth for the megapublisher going forward. But King is largely a one-trick pony at this point, relying heavily on the Candy Crush games for the vast majority of its players and revenue. Supercell's success runs a bit deeper, with mega-hit Clash of Clans backed up by smaller-but-still-big hits like Clash Royale, Boom Beach, and Hay Day.

You probably thought that Sega's official abandonment of the Dreamcast back in 2001 meant we wouldn't see any new, Sega-produced Ecco the Dolphin games for that system. If so, you thought wrong. That's because a newly unearthed prototype of the Dreamcast's cancelled Ecco II: Sentinels of the Universe has hit the Internet, more than 15 years after it was made.

The prototype build, uploaded by the game preservationists at Hidden Palace, is dated February 19, 2001, less than a month after Sega announced it would stop supporting the Dreamcast and step away from the hardware business for good. It comes to the Internet via a large lot of Ecco Dreamcast assets acquired by Hidden Palace, and the site promises "more exciting (and long overdue) [Ecco] stuff in the weeks to follow."

In addition to the ripped GD-ROM version, which is fully playable on PC Dreamcast emulators, Hidden Palace also released a self-boot CDI image that can be burned to disc and played on actual Dreamcast hardware (and hopefully on a real CRT television, for that authentic 2001 console gaming experience). We can thank the Dreamcast's extremely broken copy protection technology for that little wrinkle and for the widespread piracy that helped doom and/or popularize the system back in its day.

Since its off-handed announcement more than a year ago, Nintendo has released precious few details about its upcoming NX console, currently set for a March release. That has left the press to speculate wildly about "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept."

That's also why it qualifies as news when GameStop CEO Paul Raines confirms publicly that, yes, NX will sell games on physical media, just like pretty much every other home console ever made.

Raines' statement in a recent earnings conference call comes about a year after patent-filing-based rumors suggested the NX might eschew retail games entirely in favor of a download-based business model. Don't believe everything you read, Raines said.

Did you think that the highly anticipated, procedurally generated space exploration game No Man's Sky was in any way related to British telecommunications and broadcasting giant Sky? Of course you didn't. But it apparently took the legal system three years to come to the same conclusion.

That's according to Sean Murray, managing director of No Man's Sky maker Hello Games. Over the weekend, Murray tweeted that the company had settled a legal dispute with Sky over the game's name after "3 years of secret stupid legal nonsense." In a follow-up tweet, he added that "this is the same folks who made Microsoft change Skydrive to Onedrive... so it was pretty serious." ("On the plus side perhaps this is the real reason Skynet never happened..." he joked)

Sky did indeed go after Microsoft's Skydrive back in 2014, forcing an abrupt name change from the massive company. Last year, Sky also took legal action against Microsoft's Skype, arguing that the service's logo looked like a cloud "and thus may readily be associated with the word 'sky.'" A European court eventually agreed with that argument.

I had to wait about 30 minutes to play the E3 demo of The Last Guardian on one of the few behind-closed-doors demo stations available at this year's show. In another sense, though, I've been waiting to play Fumito Ueda's next game for seven years now, ever since its 2009 E3 debut as a PlayStation 3 game. I've been waiting even longer since Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus dazzled the gaming world in 2005.

Playing a game that has been in development that long, and with such a distinguished pedigree, it's hard to separate out the experience itself from the almost crushing weight of expectations layered on top of it. I spent a good deal of the half hour or so with The Last Guardian just in a base state of wonder that the game I was playing was actually real.

The basic gameplay in The Last Guardian demo will feel familiar to anyone who fell in love with Ueda's Ico in 2001. At its core, the game is about finding paths through intricately detailed 3D environments with light puzzle solving and navigation. In an era of sprawling, 100-hour open worlds, it's a pleasantly dated design. The Last Guardian brings an old-school focus on architectural world-building rather than endless busywork quests.

PC gamers may not be able to lord their preferred control scheme over their console brethren for much longer. Microsoft is promising that Xbox One developers will be able to easily integrate mouse and keyboard controls for their console games in a matter of months.

"Truthfully in our dev kit modes now keyboard works, mouse support is a little bit further away," Microsoft's Phil Spencer said in an interview with PCGamesN. "I say it because I know it’s not years away, it’s more like months away, but we don’t have an exact date yet."

Based on the quote, it's hard to say if that means full keyboard-and-mouse Xbox One games are just months away from market or if that's just when developers will be able to start work on adding such support for future games. Either way, it's a clear sign that Microsoft is speeding along in bridging gaming's decades-long PC-vs-console control scheme gap.

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LOS ANGELES—We first tried Oculus' hand-tracking Touch controller at E3 2015. At this year's show, we had another chance to use the company's crucial new control solution before its planned release later this year (We're hearing a possible November date through the grapevine but nothing reliable enough to be certain).

Overall, the latest prototype feels pretty similar to the controllers we first tried at last year's E3, but a few small refinements make it feel closer to a retail product. The triggers are especially easy to push now, requiring a very light touch compared to the thick, springy resistance on something like the HTC Vive's triggers. The thumbsticks seem improved with additional resistance and a rubberized grip.

As PC-based virtual reality gets off the ground, Oculus has come under fire from some corners of the community for saddling certain Oculus Rift games with exclusivity deals, barring them from working on competing headsets like the HTC Vive. Detractors argue this unfairly limits the market for competing VR hardware and goes against the ethos of interoperable accessories and controllers that's traditionally been key to the PC hardware market.

Speaking to Ars at E3 this week, though, Oculus executives defended their continuing efforts to secure exclusives for the Rift, and the technological measures meant to stop exclusivity-breaking workarounds like Revive.

The thrust of Oculus' argument for headset-exclusive software is that these exclusives are games that wouldn't exist (or wouldn't exist in quite as polished a form) if not for Oculus' often substantial funding investment. "The developer normally wouldn't be able to go and make these titles as big and immersive and deep as we enable them to do," Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars.