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Call of Duty is something we are all used to as a yearly installment, putting up huge numbers with each and every game. Black Ops III certainly followed this trend, becoming the sixth straight game in the series to break the $1 billion mark. Additionally, in North America, Call of Duty was 2015’s top-selling franchise - an award they’ve held for seven consecutive years now.[1] To add to the statistics, the life-to-date sales of Call of Duty surpassed 250 million units in 2015! (For comparison, the closest mainstream franchise is Grand Theft Auto at roughly 225 million, 95 million of which was just GTAV). Also to no one’s surprise, Call of Duty is poised to make a big impact yet again in 2016, so let’s dive in and see what they have in store! In early February, Treyarch released the first of four DLC map packs and I’d argue it was virtually everything the community asked for. In zombies, Der Eisendrache instantly became a new favorite for many. With three DLC packs to go, the community is eagerly anticipating what Blundell and his team has in store for us. Over the last few years, there have been a good deal of complaints regarding the zombies storyline, from the lackluster Black Ops 2 to the introduction of the multiverse in Origins. But with Black Ops 3, the potential certainly exists for Treyarch to turn it around. They’ve introduced many new elements into the story, but have started going back to their Black Ops 1 roots and coming full circle. Note that not all appreciate these new elements I mentioned, feeling it’s become too “otherworldly,” but only time will tell how the story progresses. In case zombies isn’t your thing, the world of multiplayer received four new maps (Splash, Skyjacked, Gauntlet, Rise) that were more-or-less well received by even the most critical gamers. Plus, competitive multiplayer grew substantially in Black Ops 3 thanks to the addition of Call of Duty World League (CWL). Presented by PlayStation and operated by Activision (who also owns Major League Gaming, remember), it’s a worldwide competitive league where the best of North America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand battle for the title of World Champions. However, if you want to get in on the action with the pros, Activision also introduced the CWL Challenge Division. It’s targeted at “aspiring or amateur Call of Duty players” and allows them “to earn their way to the” Championship. The Championship this fall will mark the conclusion of the Call of Duty World League’s first season, and because of this, Activision will be holding a “major community event” aimed at “celebrating the community.” Perhaps we’ll be seeing the return of Call of Duty: Experience (CoD XP), after its successful debut in 2011? The description for this year’s event could be interpreted as pointing to that, where fans will gain “special insight and access to the world of Call of Duty.” In the 2011 rendition, attendees could paintball, zipline, and even run through the training course. (To us zombies fans, I’m sure we can look forward to another fantastic panel!!) But of course, the entire reason CoD XP 2011 took place was to launch Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 3, and late this year, they’ll again be launching their next Call of Duty title. Their most recent game in the franchise, Ghosts, was viewed negatively by a large portion of the community, so all eyes are on them to bounce back and deliver a title that the community can get excited about. What is so interesting about Infinity Ward’s fall from grace is that they’re heralded as making some of the greatest Call of Duty games in recent times (Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2), but went downhill after losing much of their staff to Respawn Entertainment. Many wonder whether they’ll try to push the envelope with the game, as the last few games have done, or if they’ll try to appeal to the old Call of Duty crowd. Whichever way they go, Activision has promised that the game will be both “ambitious” and “great." Source: Activision View full news

We'll be implementing a new update to the site soon, this will bring a few important fixes and a few new changes. I plan to do this tomorrow / Saturday. Here is a list of the improvements. New or Changed Features When your link auto-embeds in a post such as with an image, YouTube video, Twitter link, etc. an option will now display to revert the embed back to a plain text link if you do not want the embed. New setting to disable embedding. Facebook/Twitter integration improvements If you encounter a system error STAFF will now see additional debug information, all other members will see the normal error message. Custom Fields for Support Requests in Commerce now show on the front-end. If an advertisement is set up with a main image, but not smaller images for tablets/mobiles, the ad would not show at all on tablets/mobiles. This has changed so the main image will display on all devices unless smaller images are provided. Topics scheduled to automatically lock or unlock will now reflect this in the topic listing and when viewing the topic. Placing a link to a Facebook status will embed when possible. Three character searches are now allowed in the Admin CP Live Search. The Account Settings page now uses vertical rather than horizontal tabs to prevent overflow. If Gravatar is enabled, and a user has not defined an profile photo, then their email address will be used to fetch from Gravatar unless explicitly set not to. The member REST API endpoint will now return custom fields. The Developer Center for Plugins now shows the filename in the list of hooks, and when editing a hook, a breadcrumb includes a link back to the list. Inline notifications can now be dismissed Efficiency improvements to the search index You can now close a poll independently of the topic Important Fixes In addition to dozens of smaller fixes this release includes fixes for the follow items that impacted many clients: Several security enhancements. The posting parser has been made more efficient. Some BBCode does not parse correctly in version 4 and we have applied some fixes for this. In general BBCode is deprecated so we only provide basic support. Sitemaps could sometimes be blank if there was no content in a specific section. Certain URLs from version 3 were not redirecting properly to the new version 4 format. The timezone detection is now more robust and will more gracefully fail if it cannot determine a visitor's timezone. Permission matrices have been reworked to send less data to prevent exceeding server limitations. The database class now handles InnoDB deadlocks more gracefully, and some queries have been changed to reduce the likeliness of deadlocks. Performance improvements to areas which perform large updates on the members table (for example, when editing permissions). Multiple fixes for tag searching Activity Stream Improvements The activity stream has a new toggle and filter bar that replaces the "Edit Form" link. It is now faster and easier to customize existing streams and to change the filtering options without having to create new streams. Facebook/Twitter integration improvements If signed in with Facebook or Twitter, when posting a status update, a checkbox to share on these services appears instead of the old setting to export statuses in the account settings panel. This change ensures IPS4 conforms with Facebook's Terms & Conditions and will pass Facebook's App Review. When setting up Facebook integration, a new setting allows disabling status imports so you do not need to go through Facebook's App Review if you only want to allow users to sign in with Facebook and not integrate with status updates. When setting up Facebook or Twitter integration, the setting to allow automatic sharing is shown in addition to in the sharing settings so it is easier to enable this feature. Facebook integration has been updated to use their latest API endpoints. A new guide will be available after 4.1.9's release to explain in detail how to go through Facebook's App Review process

The Rumour mill has it that Sony is working on a 4K- version of the PS4 with increased GPU to give in game visuals a boost and will also help the PS VR Known as the "PS4.5" or "PS4K", developers told Kotaku that the device would feature an improved graphical processing unit (GPU), which would give in-game visuals a boost. The increased processing power would also let it display games at 4K resolution. It's worth taking this with a pinch of salt at the moment and it's unlikely to be released this year "if at all" with sources saying it's "exploratory" according to Kotaku. Sony certainly isn't talking about it publicly, although there's murmurs of hush hush meetings. View full news

Fixed

Any reason this is all white? Doesn't look very flattering.