Beyond Co-Op - December 1st through December 8th, 2013

Battlefield 4 woes, League of Legends controversy, and Steam's big numbers

Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly feature for news related to non-cooperative games. Single player, competitive multiplayer, here's the big stories for the past week. Battlefield 4 expansions are put on hold, pro League of Legends streaming is locked down (or are they?), and Steam has a bunch of users... who knew?

The latest installment in the Battlefield franchise has been plagued with issues. In particular, multiplayer play, the hallmark of the series, has been a bud-ridden mess, such that many fans can't even play. Lag and server crashes are the order of the day. Developer DICE has acknowledged the issue previously, but the China Rising DLC pack was still recently released. Now EA has decided to put development on further DLC and expansion on hold until the game's issues are fixed. It's good to see an expectation of quality for the consumers in this case. EA's stock even fell a bit after the news, which says a lot. Kudos to EA and DICE for making it right for gamers; let's hope everything works out as planned.

Source: Gamerant

Here's a very interesting story regarding pro League of Legends players. Riot, developers of LoL, earlier this week put some restrictions into the pro player contract. The contract prohibited these pro players from playing competing games on their streams. As you can imagine, these restrictions were met with a fair amount of controversy. Riot has since flip flopped on the issue, and pro LoL players can now stream DotA, Starcraft 2, or whatever else they like. I can see where Riot was coming from, but clearly they were stepping over their bounds in this case. 

Source: Polygon

So, amidst the turkey, dressing, and cranberry sauce, it looks like this past Thanksgiving was also full of gaming. Valve's Steam service went over seven million concurrent players out of the 65 million registered users for the first time ever. The big Steam fall sale and super popular titles like DotA were contributors to this massive achievement. The rumors of PC gaming's death have clearly been exaggerated, eh?

Source: The Escapist