Kalakshar US

The next season of Overwatch 2 will bring more than the usual new hero and battle pass to the team shooter. Blizzard announced that Season 18 will introduce a new take on the progression system. As they currently stand, the progression numbers feel pretty divorced from the gameplay; this revamp introduces new ways to display your prowess to teammates and foes in matches as well as some welcome changes to how you see and equip your rewards. 

The new Progression 2.0 system has overhauled the visual side. For starters, there will be new portrait frames that increase in fanciness every 20 levels, capping at level 60. These Ascended borders will be displayed when you pick your hero for a match. Between the different Ascended frames, players will unlock five tiers of hero badges that also display in Hero Select under your portrait. 

Overwatch 2 Hero Badges

In addition to the new flash, the Hero Select screen will show your allies a card with your top heroes on it. I doubt anyone will pay too much attention to cards in the Open Queue matches, so this seems like a Competitive-angled addition. It could help make it easy to build a team composition based on the whole group’s strengths, creating a test of your crew’s cooperation ability before the game even starts. Blizzard clarified that in Competitive, opponents won’t be able to see your portrait borders until 10-15 seconds after a match begins, and hero cards won’t be displayed to an enemy until one of you eliminates each other. That means nobody should be able to use your hero card against you in the ban phase.

I’ve almost never thought about the rewards I get for progression stats because it’s unclear when I’ve gotten a new item and I rarely bother searching for them in my cosmetics collections, so having a dedicated progression menu added should place a new focus on tracking how far you’ve gotten with a particular character. The hero-specific rewards on the horizon will be displayed on that page, and already-unlocked items can be equipped directly from that menu. Blizzard is also offering occasional Epic and Legendary loot box freebies as you rise through the ranks for each hero, which is always welcome. 

The progression levels will be rewarded retroactively when the season starts. For long-time fans, that means you can expect to see a whole bunch of rewards to browse through when you first log in during Season 18. For new players, there will be more credits and cosmetics available to unlock in the first 20 levels. That first set of 20 levels will also be scaled to be quicker to complete, while later levels will require more time.

The new season kicks off tomorrow, on August 26. Season 18 will also bring a new option for keyboard and mouse controls on console and the permanent addition of watery support hero Wuyang. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/overwatch-2-will-overhaul-its-progression-systems-to-show-more-visual-flair-in-matches-214336004.html?src=rss 

Perplexity is launching a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers that will pay them every time its AI assistants use an article to answer a question, The Wall Street Journal reports. Perplexity is launching the plan (and partially paying for it) with a new Comet Plus subscription that gives subscribers access “to premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists.”

Comet Plus costs $5 per month, and based on Perplexity’s description, it’s primarily designed to account for the actions its Comet Agent (included in the Comet browser) takes on websites, which aren’t considered in existing publisher deals. “When you ask Perplexity to synthesize recent coverage of an industry trend, that’s indexed traffic,” the company writes. “When Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles relevant to your day’s meetings, that’s agent traffic.”

The company’s existing Publisher Program, which counts publications like TIME and Fortune as participants, shares ad revenue based on the traffic a Perplexity search is stealing away by providing a summary of an article. The money shared through Comet Plus will presumably account for what’s lost when an AI agent visits a webpage on your behalf, zooming past ads you’d normally see or hear.

Publishers will get 80 percent of the revenue of Comet Plus, according to Perplexity, with the remaining 20 percent allocated to “compute.” The Wall Street Journal writes that Perplexity will initially pay participating publishers out of a “$42.5 million revenue pool” that will expand over time, presumably as sign-ups grow for Comet Plus, and the Comet web browser becomes available to more people. That starting sum likely takes into account Perplexity’s existing Pro and Max subscribers, who will receive Comet Plus as part of their subscriptions and are paying into the revenue-sharing scheme by default.

It sounds generous on its face, and maybe with a large enough volume of subscribers it will be, but 80 percent of $5 is $4. That’s $4 that will presumably unlock unlimited access to a publication’s entire library of content. Most newspapers charge anywhere from $20 to $30 per month to access all of their articles. Why would they settle for less?

It’s not clear if this plan replaces Perplexity’s existing Publisher Program, or will exist alongside it. It’s also hard to say if not paying for Comet Plus will change the quality of responses you receive in Comet or Perplexity. Engadget has contacted Perplexity for more information and will update this article if we hear back.

Perplexity likely wouldn’t be exploring new revenue-sharing plans if it hadn’t already been caught plagiarizing articles in the first place. The company wants its agentic browser to be a success, and that ideally requires a certain amount of participation from the people who create the articles, images, and videos agents browse. It remains to be seen if Comet Plus is the kind of arrangement that will make publishers play ball.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/perplexity-has-cooked-up-a-new-way-to-pay-publishers-for-their-content-204255019.html?src=rss 

Google wants to get Gemini in your smart home, and it looks like it’s planning to release a lineup of new Nest Products to make it happen. The company teased a new smart speaker during its Pixel 10 launch event, and now Android Headlines has new images and details that confirm the look of the speaker and a collection of other Nest products that are on the way.

Based on the images Android Headlines sourced, Google’s new smart home lineup looks nearly identical to the cameras and doorbells it’s already selling. The exception is the new smart speaker, now called the Google Home Speaker, which is smaller and rounder than the Nest Audio, and could be a replacement for the puck-shaped Nest Mini. The new speaker will come in what looks like red, light green, black and beige color options, and offer “360-degree sound.” Android Headlines writes that the speaker also supports Gemini Live, Sound Sensing for detecting smoke alarms or glass breaking and pairing with a Google TV Streamer.

The rest of the smart home lineup will feel familiar, save for some new colors, internal tweaks and software features. The biggest change is that all of the new Nest devices built-in cameras will reportedly record in 2K resolution, rather than 1080p. They’ll also come in a selection of new colors. The Nest Cam Indoor comes in “Snow” (white), “Berry” (red) and “Hazel” (gray). The camera will include a new “Zoom and Crop” feature that lets you crop a camera feed to focus on a specific area, and be able to store up to an hour of footage locally if your Wi-Fi goes out. Google also plans to expand how long it’ll store video previews of events Nest Cams detect, taking the library of 10-second previews from one hour to three.

The Nest Cam Outdoor will only come in Snow and Hazel, but it’ll reportedly include all the new features of the Nest Cam Indoor. The same goes for the new Nest Doorbell, except it’ll be available in Snow, Hazel and “Linen” (beige). The decision to largely use the same design on its Nest devices and focus on changing internal components and software features is a similar strategy to what Google used with the Pixel 10 lineup. The phones largely look the same, but they feature improved internals and plenty of new software features.

Android Headlines writes that Google plans to use this hardware launch to also rebrand its Nest Aware and Aware Plus subscriptions. The new name for Google’s entry-level smart home subscription will be Google Home Premium. The company also plans to sell a Google Home Premium Advanced. As far as which subscription offers what, and if certain Gemini features will be locked behind a higher price, we’ll have to wait until Google details its smart home plans. The company said Gemini for Home will launch in October, so expect more official announcements in the coming months.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/googles-new-smart-home-hardware-looks-mostly-familiar-in-leaked-images-190011191.html?src=rss