• Disabled signature checking to determine if it's the source of some reported launch issues

PC Gamer: Obviously you have to tune out sometimes, but there seemed to be a strong reaction to Left 4 Dead 2. Obviously it sold really well, so what did you take away from that? Did you think “Oh, it sold anyway, we can ignore all those guys,” or did you think “We need to…”

Gabe Newell: No, we actually did a bad job of talking about our products to that community beforehand, right? That was just us not thinking ahead, and if we had talked to them about it better…
So the thing that makes me happy is when you look at the customers who self-identified as boycott members, they actually bought Left 4 Dead 2 at a higher rate than any other group of Left 4 Dead 1 owners. Which to me means we delivered a good product, because they had every reason not to buy the product. But we also spent a lot of time talking to those people, and explaining to them why this was like all our other products: it was worth their money and worth their time.

We set ourselves up by not thinking ahead to the fact that this would occur, and that’s why we spent a fair amount of time addressing those concerns, because we thought they were legitimate issues for people in the community to raise. That’s why he (indicates Erik) and I got on a plane and flew down to Australia.

Erik Johnson: Flew halfway round the world. It’s pretty rare that there’s not…

Gabe Newell: There’s always some information.

Erik Johnson: There’s always some information, in all complaints.

Gabe Newell: It’s a signal to noise problem. If you decide to tune out signal just because there’s a lot of noise, then you’re missing a tremendous amount of opportunity to do well by your customers.

Erik Johnson: I think that some people in that group were saying they were fans of Valve, and they were saying: “Has Valve changed in some way that was unannounced?” And we were like, “No, but we didn’t explain anything very well.”

- Read the full article here

• Disabled clients loading server plug-ins unless the plug-ins are signed by Steam or the client is running in insecure mode.
• Added a checkbox to the Options->Audio dialog to control muting the audio when the game window is in the background.

• Fixed crash in custom maps using the trigger_camera entity.

• Fixed another bug in the Steamworks internal stats reporting.
• Updated the localization files.

So, here's your chance to knife a DICE player. Of course we will be ready as always to take on the challenge.
We will be playing on the servers tonight between 18-22 CET.
The servers we will be playing on are clanhost.nl. Last time we had this event it was a lot of fun and I'm sure many players got to enjoy the time on the servers.

Want to know where we are playing at the moment? Want to see comments from the game?

Add us to your twitters:

www.twitter.com/zh1nt0
www.twitter.com/stormonster

Every Thursday I will begin showcasing some Community members/Teams and other people who have done something good within the Community and also those who post good questions or those who have shown a very good influence within the Community.
We have an interesting set of articles to publish for everyone so keep checking the blog for more information :).

We have received some very interesting and good videos and this is only the first week of the competition! That is great! Keep recording your most awesome videos and keep posting them to the forum moderators so they can put it in the competition thread.

http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/b...mpetition.html

On 2 sundays in a row, the player stats of PS3 players have been resetted without any notification given by EA. What is causing the resets?

Occasionally EA servers require a restart at unscheduled times, we only do this if it is urgent or required for an update to the EA servers.
Scopes on G3 and M14? yes or no once and for all?
We are receiving many questions about this and Demize99 has already explained they won’t be in there anytime soon and is constantly under review.

Any chance of getting friendly mine indicators on the gadget or the mini map like the c4 has?
It is something we haven’t considered adding but is a possible addition in the future. We however don't know when this will happen.

We explore the possibility that many in the community may have over-reacted, thanks to the lack of clear, official information on the multiplayer — in part due to poor reporting during the MP reveal. To stem some of the over-reaction and criticism that followed, Treyarch PC developer pcdev issued an official MP FAQ to help distinguish fact from fantasy. The reality of the situation may be much better than some may have thought.

On with me, as usual, to dissect the Call of Duty Black Ops MP FAQ is Jim (aka Rudedog) from fpsadmin.com.

* Fix selection highlighting of hyperlink text in chat
* Compatibility fix for Steam Service and MS KB2264107 with 0xFFFFFFFF registry setting
* Fixed issue with Steam Cloud that occurs when a game is launched outside of Steam
* Compatibility fix for in-game overlay and MS KB2264107 with 0xFFFFFFFF registry setting
* Steamworks fix for matchmaking