A small family business in the West of Ireland has been selected by global gaming giants Microsoft and Mojang as an official events partner for Minecraft community events.
O’Brien Event Management was established by mum-of-three Lisa O’Brien, who was inspired to run conventions for fans of Minecraft after witnessing her own children’s obsession with the game.
Her company is now one of only three companies worldwide to be certified as an official Minecraft community events partner.
Speaking to the Galway Advertiser, Ms. O’Brien said “being selected by Microsoft and Mojang as an official events partner for Minecraft community events is a huge honour. We are the only partner company in Ireland.
“Having this status will allow us display official Minecraft graphics at our future events, offering fans an even better and more immersive experience. It will also enable us to strengthen our relationships with the global Minecraft community, including those who produce the maps used by Minecraft players when they bring in Microsoft educations to explain the powers of Minecraft to event attendees.
“Becoming an official partner will help hugely in continuing to grow our event, attracting world-class participants and sponsors, and ensuring we’re the No. 1 event for Minecraft fans in Ireland and beyond.”
Ms O’Brien ran her first “MineVention” event in Galway in December 2014. The 1,500 tickets for the event sold out in just nine hours and, since then, she has run an additional 20 MineVention events and workshops in 10 locations nationwide. Over 35,000 people have attended her events.
Tickets for Ireland’s next MineVention event are on sale now. The event will take place in Dublin’s RDS on 14th and 15th April. Tickets start from €15 and are available through Ticketmaster.
“When we started out in 2014, we had no idea of the demand that was out there from Minecraft fans. Parents had their children literally begging them to get tickets to our events.
“The support we’ve received from the Minecraft community and attendees has been overwhelming. We attribute our success to being responsive and keeping it real: we’re a small company and we personally deal with all aspects of the event – from programming, marketing and ticketing to email enquiries and social media.
“We take all feedback on board, and we implement changes and improvements all the time in response to what we’re hearing from Minecraft fans. We’ve also built up excellent relationships with Minecraft content creators: we’ve had some of the most high-profile people in the global Minecraft community attending and participating in our events.”
Minecraft is one of the most popular computer games ever developed, selling over 122 million copies since it launched in 2009.
Its popularity is so great that a community of professional YouTubers has emerged – gamers who make a living from posting videos of themselves online playing Minecraft.
The attendance of these professional gamers at the various events over the years has been one of the most popular elements of MineVention, says Lisa O’Brien.
“The ‘meet and greets’ with YouTubers have been hugely successful,” she says. “However, there’s a lot more than that to our events. We also have Minecraft VR, Education in Minecraft, gaming tournaments, ‘Build Battle’ stages, games, and arts and crafts.
“We’ve partnered with Autism Action to make sure our events are accessible and welcoming for children with autism and, in 2018, we’re introducing lots of new elements, including the chance to play on new maps built by Mojang’s MarketPlace and to visit our streaming zone to see how it all works. The fact that we’re now an official Minecraft partner means our 2018 event will be the best yet.”
O’Brien Event Management is based in Portumna, Co. Galway, and employs four people alongside Ms. O’Brien, with plans to recruit a further three staff-members in the coming year.
Further information about MineVention 2018 is available at www.minevention.com
Square Enix can claim a few of the year's biggest success stories with games like Nier: Automata, Final Fantasy XV, and the continued success of Final Fantasy XIV. And while Square Enix has floated games as services as the future of the industry, bolstered by a successful series of mobile games, it appears the recent controversies around microtransactions have made an impact on the company.
In a recent interview with Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda for MCV, the Square Enix head shared some thoughts about microtransactions in the current game climate and how the practice might not suit console games.
“What people expect and want in a home console game is perhaps quite different from what people want in a mobile game,” said Matsuda. “The way that console games are made, the volume of content and how much effort goes into them, there's something in that which doesn't fit in the mind with microtransactions.”
Final Fantasy XV has released a steady stream of DLC.1
The statement is rather interesting because earlier this year, Matsuda said that the focus in the industry is shifting towards games as services, a style of game where players would be continuously tied to a single game thanks to regular content releases. There appears to be an acknowledgement that microtransactions in full content, $60 games are incompatible.
However in the age of season passes, story expansions, and other forms of DLC, it's hard to take this as an outright indictment of microtransactions from the Square Enix CEO. What's clear is that Matsuda seems to argue that the tactics for microtransactions found in mobile games can't, or won't, work in console games. What that means in practice is still unclear.
EA kicked up a huge controversy regarding microtransactions with Star Wars Battlefront 2 this holiday season. The game offered players who wanted an “accelerated” experience an option to purchase game-improving upgrades. This generated anger among players who felt it to be unfair for players who have to otherwise play hours and hours of game content to receive the benefits of players who can buy their way to the top.
Now the industry is reeling from the controversy, with lawmakers calling for investigations into loot practices and EA considering abandoning loot boxes altogether.
Square Enix for its part found major success with the single-player Nier: Automata. There's a good chance that its success and the toxicity around microtransactions could convince Square Enix to stay clear from practices that could potentially anger players like loot boxes.
The Xbox One version of PUBG hasn’t had the smoothest of releases, with the game’s performance and visuals coming under fire from players. Thankfully, PUBG on Xbox One is set to be improved today thanks to the game’s first patch.
PUBG on Xbox One currently suffers from some pretty severe frame rate issues and isn’t much of a looker (on either Xbox One or Xbox One X), but the first steps to improve things start today. As well as a series of bug fixes, gameplay, and UI tweaks, the debut patch for PUBG on Xbox One will provide a first pass on visual and performance improvements.
That’s great news for players of PUBG on Xbox One X. While the game is part of the Xbox Game Preview program and as such is a work in progress, such a high profile game performing so badly on the consoles isn’t a good look for Microsoft. As the firm battles to gain some ground on the PlayStation 4, it's hoping the power of the Xbox One X will win over some players.
The Xbox One PUBG patch will go live today at 1AM PST / 10AM CET / 6PM KST. Detailed patch are below:
Gameplay
Gas can now be used while on bike or bike with sidecar
UI/UX
Equipment icons on HUD will now be visible
Player icon is now more clearly visible on the world map
UI prompts now appear when reload and enter a vehicle options are present
Character
Tweaked hair color options
Animation
Cleaned up sidecar passenger animations in first person view
Fixed player camera issues while a passenger on the backseat of a Buggy
Addressed arm animations specific to holding some weapons
Character now correctly faces the proper direction when stopping while swimming
Others
First pass visual and performance improvements
Slightly improved anti-aliasing on Xbox One and Xbox One S
Localization updates for Vietnamese, Spanish,(Spain/Mexico)
Controls on motorcycle no longer inverted
Keyboard functionality is disabled
Bug Fixes
Fixed instances of player nametags not properly displaying in the lobby during Squad and Duo play
Fixed minor animation while crouching and prone
Fixed issues where curtains on windows block line of sight of players in the TPP mode
Fixed an issue where when Squad leader left the party, voice chat ceased to function as intended
Fixed issue where players could lean out of vehicles even when obstructed
Fixed collision of cardboard boxes in Yasnaya city
Fixed typo in the controller guide
Other minor fixes
Read all about how to get better at PUBG on Xbox One in our PUBG Xbox One guides.
Back in September, Microsoft and Mojang launched the Better Together update for Minecraft on Windows 10, Xbox One, iOS, and Android. This update allowed players on those devices to play together and access the Marketplace on any of those platforms.
The new Better Together versions of Minecraft are known collectively as the Bedrock Edition. The Bedrock games avoid the “___ Edition” naming scheme on their respective platforms, being just “Minecraft” instead of “Minecraft: Pocket Edition” or “Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition”. This is the new foundation and codebase Mojang wants to build upon, hence the name.
In the case of Minecraft on Xbox One, if you purchase the game now on the Xbox Store, it's the Bedrock Edition, called “Minecraft”. If you had the previous Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, you get the new version for free, but the old one remains installed on your console. This allows players to switch back and forth between both versions and players are finding they prefer the old Xbox One Edition.
If you go to the Microsoft Store page for Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, the game is rated at 4.5 stars out of 5 with 111,000 reviews. In contrast, the new Minecraft entry is rated at 2.5 stars out of 5, with 5,634 reviews as of this writing.
“The Xbox One Edition was designed for Xbox, this version is literally a port from PC. The creative inventory is a disarray and difficult to navigate, placing blocks is much slower as being precise is terribly difficult. The graphics are a disgrace, the game crashes every 30 mins, everything is laggy,” said one review. (Edited for spelling and formatting.)
“The new crafting and inventory menus are quite cumbersome and seem rushed. It now takes easily twice as long to perform trivial tasks like swapping items in these menus in creative mode. The previous setup was much more streamlined and easier to use,” added another review.
“I played this version in beta and it was not ready for a public release. There are numerous problems that went unaddressed or were flat out ignored. To list a few: Frame rate is extremely unstable and drops considerable. This version is not optimized for redstone and more complicated devices produce massive amounts of lag,” said one review from last month.
The previous Minecraft editions were customized for their specific platforms by 4J Studios, who no longer seem to be involved in the new versions. They took into account the technology behind each console or device, and tailored the releases to those platforms.
Players are saying that the Bedrock Edition represents a step back. There are lost features like large biomes, some players dislike the new UI and Creative mode controls, there are reported frame rate issues, lag, and crashes that didn't occur in previous editions, and some players can't even convert their worlds over to the new version. One of the top requests on the Minecraft support site is for a console UI for the Bedrock Editions on Xbox One.
Players on Xbox One have gone around the problem by simply playing the old Xbox One Edition, but Mojang isn't updating that version anymore. If players want new features, they'll need to upgrade eventually. Currently, the Nintendo Switch version is supposed to join the Better Together party at a later date, but some Switch players are hoping that update can be pushed down the line until the Bedrock codebase has seen some fixes. Hopefully, Mojang and Microsoft keep plugging away at the new unified Minecraft, because players aren't happy.
“The game is brilliant in a lot of ways,” observed Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter and well-known cybersecurity blogger at KrebsonSecurity.com, talking about the incredibly popular Lego-like video game where players make things out of virtual blocks. “You can build anything and destroy anything. You just make up things as you go along.”
Paras Jha, a Rutgers University computer science major, was apparently a Minecraft devotee, playing the game with others in an on-line world where everyone knows each other by their screen names.
That was before the 21-year-old from Fanwood wrote the computer code that was later used by others in one of the biggest internet attacks of the decade.
The unsealing of federal charges Wednesday against Jha and two other young men in connection with a series of earlier cyber attacks was described by prosecutors in terms most familiar to a computer security expert. The trio, according to the feds, created and operated two “botnets” which targeted “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, launching a powerful distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack that crippled web hosting companies across the country.
But essentially what they were doing, according to authorities, was running a sophisticated high-tech protection racket.
Federal prosecutors have not provided much detail into what motivated them. However, investigators and computer security experts say it all may have begun with Minecraft, the game with no rules.
And the muscle they employed was a malicious computer software program they had written. That code was used by others–their identities still unknown–to infect hundreds of thousands of devices connected to the internet in a massive online attack in October 2016 that blocked access to Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, PayPal and many other popular websites.
No one has been charged in that incident, which came after Jha and others posted their malware on the Dark Web.
Jha, together with Josiah White, 20, of Washington, Pa., and Dalton Norman, 21, of Metairie, La., earlier this month pleaded guilty to creating and operating a network of compromised computers known as “botnets” that were used in a number of attacks on several host servers.
Jha also last week pleaded guilty to a series of separate attacks that took out the Rutgers computer network.
Appearing in court before U.S. District Court Judge Michael Shipp in Trenton, Jha acknowledged his involvement, but offered little more. His attorney, Robert Stahl of Westfield, said “Paras Jha is a brilliant young man whose intellect and technical skills far exceeded his emotional maturity.”
Investigators say Jha was immersed in online gaming culture, and was adept at writing code–the software that controls a computer.
An image from Minecraft. (Notch Development AB | file photo)
But there is a dark side to cyber gaming. Popular game servers are often targeted for sport. And sometimes, for money.
Krebs, who was the first to link Jha to the cyber attacks and the software that caused them, said there is a lot of money to be made off hosting Minecraft servers. Some in the industry have told him it's not hard to make $200,000 or more a month.
That did not go unnoticed.
“What started happening in 2013 and 2014 was the biggest Minecraft servers began to come under DDoS attacks,” said Krebs, noting that some of these operations were willing to “pay handsomely to protect them from these type of attacks, which are fairly complicated.”
Distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS attacks involve the hijacking of hundreds of computers, which are used to flood the internet connection of a targeted server or computers. Such an attack generates a barrage of so many fake requests for information that the server typically crashes under the assault.
“It only takes a while for some of these servers to be off line before someone says ‘screw it, I'll find someplace else that doesn't have problems,'” Krebs noted.
Jha was one of those who created a business offering his services to companies hosting Minecraft servers, to protect against DDoS attacks, said Krebs.
According to court filings, however, Jha had also created a botnet–a collection of hijacked computers that were infected with malware software used to launch the kind of distributed denial-of-service attacks that were plaguing many of the Minecraft game servers.
However, the targets of the worm Jha and others used to create the botnet was something that had not been seen before, according to the Justice Department. It burrowed into non-traditional computing devices connected to the internet, such as wireless cameras, home routers, and digital video recorders, the so-called “Internet of Things.”
“Some of these devices have no way to change default passwords,” noted Adam Alexander, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Alaska, where the hidden controlling software corrupting the internet-connected things was first discovered.
The authors of the botnet called it Mirai, named after a popular character in Japanese anime, according to FBI case agents who said the three were fans. The Justice Department said the Mirai botnet, at its peak, was made up of hundreds of thousands of compromised devices.
“Once they built the botnet, they sought to make money by renting it or extorting companies for money,” said William Fitzpatrick, the acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, where the botnet repeatedly hit the computer network at Rutgers University.
According to the government, Jha ran Mirai on computers from his family home in Fanwood.
Beginning in the summer of 2016, Mirai was deployed to conduct attacks against a number of game servers and hosting companies. Prosecutors said Jha contacted one company and demanded payment in exchange for halting the attack. They said he also bragged about his exploits using monikers such as “ormemes” and “Anna Senpai” on discussion boards, soliciting clients.
That bravado also served to unmask him.
Krebs began a deep dive into the Mirai botnet after his own site was forced offline by a DDoS attack for nearly four days.
In addition to those attacks, prosecutors said Jha and Norman made money with software that duped on-line advertisers.
“They build a botnet to commit click fraud,” said Fitzpatrick.
Click fraud is a scheme to artificially pump up the number of “clicks” on a particular website, to increase advertising revenue generally based on how many times someone clicks on a page. In Jha's plea agreement, prosecutors said the student leased access to his click fraud botnet in exchange for payment.
“Because the victim activity resembled legitimate view of these websites, the activity generated fraudulent profits through the sites hosting the advertising content, at the expense of the on-line advertising companies,” noted the court filing.
That scam netted Jha and others 100 bitcoin, valued at the time at more than $180,000, said prosecutors.
Closer to home, even before those attacks, Jha admitted he had initiated DDoS attacks on the computer network at Rutgers University, where he was then studying.
Rutgers' high-performance computing center. John O'Boyle | Star-Ledger file photo)
In 2014, the university first began to get hit with a series of denial-of-service attacks that crashed Rutgers' websites and cut off Internet and Wi-Fi access to tens of thousands of students, faculty and employees. The university, which had announced it planned to spend $3 million to upgrade its computer security system, was taunted by someone on Twitter using the screen name “exfocus.”
“where internet go?? 3m dollar gone?” asked one tweet.
In a courtroom in Trenton on Wednesday, Jha, who is no longer at Rutgers, admitted that he was “exfocus.” And he said he timed the attack during midterms when it would cause the most disruption.
He did not say why.
Prosecutors said toward the end of the scheme, Jha took steps to conceal his role in the Mirai botnet.
In September 2016, the government said he erased the files on his home computer and then posted the Mirai code online, “in order to create plausible deniability if law enforcement found the code on computers controlled by Jha or his co-conspirators.”
The following month, other hackers took the Mirai code and launched a massive cyber attack that crippled much of the internet, crashing Twitter, Netflix and other websites.
Who they are remains a mystery.
All three men have pleaded guilty in the District of Alaska to charges of conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act in operating the Mirai Botnet.
Jha pleaded separately in New Jersey to launching the cyber attack on the Rutgers University computer network.
Minecraft is a game that most people certainly have heard of. If you do not know about the game, ask a child who will likely to give a very enthusiastic response that can last up to several minutes (or hours depending on the child). As of the time I wrote this article, Minecraft was the No. 1 best-selling PC game in history. Minecraft has been so successful that it caught the attention of Microsoft, which purchased the game as well as the founding company, Mojang, in 2014.
I first heard about Minecraft about three years ago when numerous students in my class constantly talked about it. Hearing about this game so annoyed me that I wanted nothing to do with it. The concept of Minecraft sounded confusing to me, and I could not figure out why it was such a popular game with children. About a year after I first heard about it, I caved in and bought the game to check it out. As the saying goes: “curiosity killed the cat.” It definitely killed my skepticism about the game, and I became hooked within just a couple days. One night I played Minecraft so intensely that it was 1 a.m. before I realized it.
For those who don’t know about Minecraft, it is an open-world concept game where players can build, mine, fly, explore and do just about anything their heart desires. Players can be in creative mode, which allows them to build with unlimited blocks and fly around the world they are in. They also can be in survival mode, where they create weapons using materials they find; obtain food by hunting animals and planting gardens; and build an appropriate shelter to protect themselves from monsters that are ready to attack or blow up the players. Minecraft is available in multiplayer mode so numerous people can build in the same world at the same time.
Parents and teachers need to be in tune with what children are engaged in and find ways to use it as an educational tool. Minecraft is one of the rare games that can be used in every classroom subject and beyond. Children are still fascinated with the game, so this is our chance to capitalize on it and use it to our advantage.
Here are some ideas for you to use Minecraft with your children or students:
–Math and Minecraft go hand in hand in several ways.
One, it is very easy to integrate area and perimeter in the game. Have the child build something with a square shape in Minecraft, and after they are done they can count the blocks on each side and calculate the area and perimeter. For older elementary and junior high children, integrate volume as well and have them find the answer. Each block in Minecraft is one meter long, wide, and high. Older students can calculate the exact area and perimeter using that information.
Another topic that usually is introduced in fifth grade is finding the area of composite shapes. A teacher approached me and told me that her students were not doing well in this topic, so I taught it using Minecraft to see how the students would respond. As I broke the composite shape down into two different shapes using different blocks, it clicked for the class. Students’ scores in this topic went up dramatically, and it was all because of the game.
–You can use Minecraft in science by allowing students to be creative.
If younger students are having a difficult time understanding ecosystems, there is a world that can be downloaded that introduces different habitats. For older students who are learning about the respiratory system, download a world where students can explore how air travels down the trachea to the lungs and ultimately to the blood.
If you google the subject you are looking, for followed by “Minecraft world,” there’s a good chance that a world already has been made.
–Reading and Minecraft work very well together, believe it or not.
You can have the child recreate a scene from a book they are reading and have them act out what they have read so far. You can also have them place signs in order and have them type the sequence of events in the story. Signs have many uses, such as creating a story and having the child read it out loud. They also can be very helpful with comprehension, phonics or any other topic the child is not doing well in.
–Minecraft can also be used in social studies, foreign languages or art.
You can show the child a building from the 1700s and have them recreate it by using the features being studied. Signs can also be used to label different parts in a house in the language they are learning. In art, students can recreate a painting to the best of their ability to identify shading, tint and more.
Minecraft can even be used as an assessment tool. You can get real creative and make rooms with four doors as the answer choices. Place the question on a sign on the side of the room, then place chests behind each door. The right answer choice can have food of some sort, while the wrong answer choice can have rotten flesh.
These are just a few ideas on how Minecraft can be tailored to the needs of the child to increase learning in whatever subject is being taught. This game has the amazing power of immediately engaging students, so I challenge you today to help your children or students by implementing ideas such as this to bring learning to their level. A big thing holding us back is fear, so for the sake of the children, let’s get out of our comfort bubble and do what’s best for them.
D.J. Rambo teaches technology at Pease Communications and Technology Academy.
