It seems like more and more games are taking away the option of cross-team chat. This is an obvious response to the harassment and toxicity that can come along with certain game communities, but is it fair to decide to silence the other team before your game is even out? Does blocking cross-team chat actually help with reducing toxicity among players? That’s one of our main topics in this episode.

Additionally, Blizzard has announced that Overwatch is NOT free-2-play, and Jarret couldn’t be happier. Assassins Creed Syndicate is seeing slow sales, and Ubisoft blames Assassins Creed Unity for the slump. That makes sense, because, you know, delivering a broken game and taking months to fix it (which for one console meant downloading the entire game over again) is a great way to break consumer trust. Jarret has ideas for Ubisoft, Nick thinks it’s time to put the horse down.

Microtransactions seem to be going over well in Halo 5. 343 hasn’t delivered any official numbers, but they added an additional $500,000 to the World Championship prize pool, which is only a fraction of the revenue they’ve received from Halo 5 microtransactions – and we’re sure that fraction isn’t ½. At any rate, they’re swimming in cash. We talk about all of this and more as Jarret returns on this weeks Mashcast.

Hosts

Jarret Redding

Jarret is Executive Director as well as one of the founding members of Mash Those Buttons. He plays all types of games, but tends to lean more toward FPS, Stealth, and Combat games.

Nick Zielenkievicz

Host of WoW! Talk! and The Tauren & The Goblin. Sometimes known as the Video Games Public Defender. Wants to play more Destiny and Marvel Heroes but WoW is all-consuming. Decent F2P Hearthstone player. Sad that he lost the Wii that had Wrecking Crew on it. Would be happy if the only game ever made was M.U.L.E. Gragtharr on Skywall-US. Garresque on Ravencrest-US.

The Latest from Mash