Just to be clear Mike you can talk to the other side just not in general chat. So you can taunt someone you just ganked in clear text if your standing right by them.
I just cannot figure out how Valve is getting away with taking the EXACT heroes from the original W3 custom game and not getting their pants sued off by Blizz. Ranger, giant, angry red orc, okay, you can pass those off as generic fantasy, but when you have an abomination, a dreadlord, a slightly less pandaren brewmaster, and for god's sake a hydralisk, how do you avoid copyright infringement?
There are several ways it can be legal for exampel they can have an agreement with Blizzard that allows them to use their concept in their game or have bought rights from blizzard to use them. But I dont think its that easy to actully be abel to sue someone over similar looking characters becouse Blizzard was not the first to make Orcs,Abomations,Hydralisks and Dreadlords(They are kinda a mix between vampires and demons).
Blizzard has not, to my knowledge, let Valve buy rights to use their IP; they already went to court to block Valve from being able to use the Dota name.
Thanks for a good show Mike, I personally didn't have time to watch the entire gamescom show so this was exactly what I needed :). One question though, and I've actually been wondering about this for a long while; what is the name of that electronic-sounding song played during the Assassin's creed "montage". Been trying to find it ever since I heard it on some gamebreaker video. Help would be much appreciated :)
Cross-faction chat isn't out, just cross-faction area channels like 'General' or 'Trade'. You can still /say smack-talk the other side if you're standing next to them, you just can't hear their crap Allakhazam jokes. So sayeth the dev tracker, anyway.
Edit: Never seen a name filtered before... Allakhazam jokes sound terrible.