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Blizzard fans might have noticed that StarCraft’s Tychus Findlay, who’s a playable character in Heroes of the Storm, no longer has his signature cigar hanging out the side of his mouth. As Blizzard recently explained in a post to Reddit, the decision to remove the cigar had to do with the game’s rating.

Heroes of the Storm is published in multiple regions with a teen rating, so there are a number guidelines Blizzard has to adhere to. There are are regions where Findlay couldn’t smoke and keep the teen rating, so Blizzard could either make two versions of the character (smoking and non-smoking) or just remove the cigar entirely.

“Making 2 versions means more data management, multiple duplicates of the asset (if we update an animation, it has to propagate to all versions) such as the the death ragdoll model, The facial animations, his morph into the Odin, and apply that process to every skin as well,” a Blizzard developer said. “This mountain of work affects multiple departments and has to be addressed every time we’d adjust Tychus.”

Blizzard said that this isn’t the first time it had to adjust a Heroes of the Storm character’s appearance to accommodate rules in different regions. Any character that has a skeletal or bloody element has to be changed or removed entirely in some regions.

“It is a full time job managing those exceptions, and the less we have to manage, the more time we can spend making more game!” Blizzard said.

Ahead of the game’s official launch early next month, Heroes of the Storm has entered open beta, meaning anyone can now freely download and play Blizzard’s take on the increasingly popular MOBA genre.

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Fire investigators in Colorado Springs think that a Wii console is the likely cause of a fire inside a RV home this week, local NBC news channel KOAA 5 reports.

The homeowner Trevor Pellegrin told KOAA 5 that he was not at home when the fire started. Pellegrin said that the fire also had nothing to do with the Wii wires, and that it started inside of the actual console.

A spokesperson for the Colorado Springs Fire Department told KOAA 5 that all other possible sources of ignition were ruled out.

The fire melted Pellegrin’s TV, his Wii, and some of his clothes, and while his roof suffered “extensive smoke damage,” it seems his home survived the incident.

In the comments section to the KOAA 5 website, Pellegrin says that he got in touch with a Nintendo representative, but the he was located in the United Kingdom, so he was redirected to Nintendo of America.

One of the images from KKTVO 11 News video segment about the fire shows that Pellegrin also owns an Xbox 360, which appears to have survived the fire unscathed.

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The creators of HonorBuddy, a popular World of Warcraft bot that was recently detected by Blizzard, is planning to bring the service back to life.

HonorBuddy allows players to collect honor in PvP without actually engaging anyone and requires no input from the player.

“We will soon release Honorbuddy again,” staff member “Bossland” said in a post on the official Honorbuddy forum. “Again, we will give no guarantee and we have never given a guarantee, that our software is immune to detection or bans.”

Honorbuddy speculated that its client was detected via “malware-type hidden software,” which scanned and found computers that were running software that violated the World of Warcraft’s terms of service.

Bossland said that they expect to bring Honorbuddy back by the end of the week, but it doesn’t seem like they have quite yet.

Honorbuddy also disputed Blizzard’s claim that over 100,000 World of Warcraft account were banned during the ban wave on May 13. “there has never been that many active Honorbuddy users,” they said.

Outside of World of Warcraft, Blizzard is gearing up to launch a new MOBA called Heroes of the Storm, which is pitched as a competitive online game in the same vein as League of Legends or DotA 2, but said to be more approachable.

It is also working on a team-based shooter called Overwatch, which it has described as a “pick-up-and-play” FPS. Find out more about the game in GameSpot’s in-depth report on Overwatch‘s characters and gameplay.

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