Do you know what you were doing on May 15, 2012? This time last year, I was resisting the urge to bash my computer screen in with an axe as Diablo 3 spat Error 37 at me over and over again. Good times!

Fortunately all those hiccups have now been cleared, and Diablo 3 is celebrating its first birthday today (and just after the auction houses have come back online, too!).

Some of the major Diablo 3 events of the last year have included the announcement of the game on PS3 (with offline mode, no less), Jay Wilson admitting that they would “turn off the auction house if we could”, and the introduction of duelling and Monster Power commands.

After the rampant sales success of the game, scientists have now concluded that the colour palette was probably not too bright and cartoony after all.

Source: Battle.net

With Diablo 3‘s auction houses now both back online following an exploit, Blizzard have been working hard to track down and remove the fraudulent gold and cash from the economy, as well as punish the wrong-doers.

Production director Jon Hight explains that the bug was “the result of a coding error that was exposed when we increased the gold stack size from 1 million to 10 million. This resulted in an overflow on cancelled auctions that yielded a greater amount of gold in return.”

“Only a relatively small number of players had the billions of gold necessary to exploit the bug, and only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain.”

Blizzard decided against doing a rollback as the “vast majority of players did not participate in the exploit and we didn’t like the idea of punishing them for the bad behavior of a few people”. Instead, they’ve been working through targeted audits to remove the duplicated gold and ban the offenders. Hight claims that Blizzard have now collected over 85% of the excess gold, and performed a full code audit.

In a lovely gesture, Hight also revealed that Blizzard would be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the exploiting players to Children’s Miracle Network Hostpitals — including all of the sale proceeds that they offenders would have received, as well as Blizzard’s transaction fee. Good stuff.

Source: Battle.net

Last week Blizzard released a patch for Diablo III accidentally enabling an exploit, which led to utter chaos in the RPG’s delicate economy and resulted in both Auction Houses going offline.

Judging by the timestamps on Blizzard’s official forum thread on the subject, it took the developer about three days to resolve the issue, run maintenance to apply a fix, and open the real money and gold storefronts again. During this time, Blizzard had to renege on an ETA, with predictable rage fallout from those simply unable to cope without selling fancy magic hats at their convenience.

Due to concerns over server loads, access was limited as the Auction house re-opened, and Blizzard is still warily calling for bug reports if you notice anything weird in the wake of its hurried patching.

Source: Battle.net

Blizzard have pulled both the Diablo 3 real money and gold auction houses offline today following the discovery of a new way to duplicate gold using an exploit introduced in the just-released patch 1.0.8.

It seems the glitch centers around the ability of users to cancel transactions before they are complete, resulting in a duplication of the gold involved. Acting swiftly, Blizzard have pulled the plug and also announced they will be investigating accounts found to be exploiting the glitch.

“After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we made the decision to take the gold and real-money Auction Houses offline to investigate a bug that certain players were exploiting to dupe gold. Our team is working hard to fix any outstanding issues and take appropriate actions with the accounts involved,” reads the statement.

“The Auction House services will be restored as soon as the situation is resolved. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we’ll continue to monitor activity on Battle.net and take action as needed.”

Patch 1.0.8 is otherwise quite excellent-looking (read the patch notes here), with players now receiving a 10% bonus to Magic Find, Gold Find, and Experience per additional player in a multiplayer game, up to a maximum of 30% in a four-player game. Get together with your friends and kill some monsters!

Source: Kotaku

A bunch of multiplayer improvements are heading to Diablo III, including massive experience boosts for anybody playing with friends and automatic notifications when fighting elite mobs.

“At the moment we’re looking at 10% more XP per extra player in the game for a maximum bonus of 30% more XP in a 4-player game,” says developer Wyatt Cheng in a developer journal. “This bonus will be multiplicative with MP bonuses. For example: suppose you are playing on MP10 with an XP bonus in Inferno of 510%. This means a monster is worth 610% of its normal XP (510% more). If you are playing in a 4-player game the monster will be worth 793% as much XP as normal.”

“On top of this, you will also earn a flat 10% Gold Find and 10% Magic Find for each additional player in the game, and this bonus can exceed the 300% Gold Find and Magic Find caps.”

Also coming in 1.0.8 will be automatic chat notifications when a player encounters or is attacked by an elite mob, so you don’t have to spam ‘e’ in chat anymore. “This will be accompanied by a ‘combat’ icon on the mini-map so other players in your group can locate those enemies,” explains Cheng.

“On top of that, we’re also going to put a combat icon over your banner in town. This way, players who are in town will know that you’re fighting an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin and be able to quickly determine whose banner to take to get right into the action.”

Check out the rest of the changes over on Battle.net.

Source: Battle.net

Some very interesting comments have surfaced from Jay Wilson, the former head of Diablo III‘s development team at Blizzard over the weekend. Speaking at this year’s GDC, Wilson commented that the presence of the auction houses (both real money and in-game currency) “really hurt the game”.

Wilson said that before launch, they’d worked on a few assumptions: the auction houses would help to reduce fraud, only a small percentage of players would bother using them, and that the market would be mostly self-regulating in terms of prices. Those assumptions were completely wrong, he revealed — in fact out of the three million players every month (an impressive figure), nearly every single one has used the auction house. As a result, the in-game currency auction house has actually been the far more popular of the two and the most damaging.

“I think we would turn it off if we could,” said Wilson, “but it’s not as easy as that.” He explained that Blizzard doesn’t want to remove something that a lot of players are potentially enjoying, as they have “no idea” how many people love it or hate it. But they are apparently working on a solution — although details were not discussed.

Source: Joystiq (thanks Richard!)

Currently in Diablo III a few players have been making tidy profits by selling their items to others and then phoning/emailing Blizzard to request a rollback on their “compromised” account. It’s not a huge problem, but it’s widespread enough that Blizzard have taken notice of it and instituted a policy to force all items on rolled-back characters to be immediately account-bound.

“Last December, we made some changes to our regional account rollback policy for players in our Asia region,” writes Lylirra on the Diablo III forums. “We implemented this update to protect the in-game economy from the noted rise of false compromised account claims by players attempting to gain duplicate items.”

“This policy has proven very effective in helping reduce the number of duplicate items in the game while still allowing us to assist legitimately compromised players, and now we’re ready to roll it out for our Americas and European regions. Starting on Tuesday, April 2, all character equipment including weapons and armor restored via the Diablo III rollback service will become bound to the restored account. This means restored items cannot be traded with other players or posted on the auction house, but that they can still be shared with other characters on the account and sold to merchant NPCs.”

Will this change affect you? Let us know below.

Source: Battle.net via Blue’s News

We all basically expected it, but the announcement that Diablo III was coming to PS3 and PS4 meant the vain hope that we’d be able to play cross-platform with our console brethren. Alas, this has been confirmed not to be the case.

Community manager Vaeflare took to the Battle.net forums to explain that while they think it’d be awesome, it’s not currently planned. “There are currently no plans to allow connectivity between PlayStation Network and Battle.net (this is pretty standard for most games that have PC and console support),” she said. “As a result, the characters on your Battle.net account and PlayStation account will also remain separate.”

Vaeflare also explained that just as Diablo III on PC does not support a controller, so the PS3 version will not support a keyboard and mouse. “In terms of allowing an analog controller hookup for the PC, we don’t have any plans for that kind of support right now. Similarly, since Diablo III for console was designed with a controller in mind, the PlayStation version of Diablo III will not support USB mice or keyboards.”

Source: Battle.net via Blue’s News

The lack of offline play was a huge disappointment to many Diablo fans when it was revealed — but now a new interview from Blizzard with Gametrailers seems to hint at the existence of an offline-mode in the PlayStation 4 version of the game.

John Hight, a production director at Blizzard, says in the interview (around the 8:35 mark) that “We think the thing that was really cool, that Chris talked about, is that we’re going to allow for local co-op as well as online co-op.”

“So you can have four people on the same screen, no split-screen, and we just zoom the camera out, or if you’re offline…”

At this point he is cut off by the host but, as WoW Insider point out, the heavy implication in this unfinished sentence is that Diablo III will support offline gameplay as an option.

Source: Gametrailer via WoW Insider

One of the thrills of Diablo and every game to have spawned from or been inspired by its loins has been the delight of finding new items on the fresh corpses of monsters, comparing stats with them, and then smacking more monsters with the new weapon until the whole process repeats.

Responding to an enormous Battle.net thread titled “How It Went Terribly Wrong, Because They Listened To Us”, Blizzard’s Community Manager Grimiku said that “We know that (for many players) it’s much more rewarding to gear up from items that you find while playing normally than it is to necessarily go through Auction House, and we’re working to make improvements in that area.”

“There are a lot of ways we could attempt to reach that goal, and choosing the best one(s) to go with is not always a fast process. I want to encourage you all to continue to post your thoughts on the subject and I promise we will keep reading and relaying them.”

Many long-term Diablo players disliked the idea of an Auction House, but just as many have used and enjoyed it. How do you feel — does it detract from the main gameplay too much?

Source: Battle.net via PC Gamer

Rob Pardo, one of Blizzard’s key members, has stepped up to defend Diablo III designer Jay Wilson in the wake of Wilson’s announcement that he was departing the Diablo III development team.

“This thread saddens me greatly. I know that the Battle.net forums have earned a reputation for rough justice, but I do not believe justice is being served by how people are speaking about Jay’s departure from Diablo III,” said Pardo on the Battle.net forums.

“I am very proud of the Diablo franchise and what the team was able to accomplish with Diablo III. As a gamer I have enjoyed the game and played for many, many nights with friends and family. I’m not, however, going to use that as an excuse. The Diablo community deserves an even better game from Blizzard and we are committed to improving it. We have a talented team in place and have no intention of stopping work on Diablo III until it is the best game in the franchise.”

“I’m the only person in this thread who has actually worked with Jay,” pointed out Pardo. “I hired Jay to head up the Diablo project and had the pleasure of getting to work with him, both in building the team and designing the game. He has great design instincts and has added so much to the franchise with his feel for visceral combat, boss battles, and an unparalleled knack for making it fun to smash bad guys. I’ve worked with many, many designers at Blizzard and Jay is one of the best. He has a great career at Blizzard ahead of him and I guarantee that you will enjoy Jay’s game designs in future Blizzard games.”

“If you love Diablo as much as we do, then please continue to let us know how you feel we can improve the game. If you still feel the need to dish out blame, then I would prefer you direct it at me. I was the executive producer on the project; I hired Jay and I gave him advice and direction throughout the development process. I was ultimately responsible for the game we released and take full responsibility for the quality of the result.”

Jay Wilson has been an instrumental figure in the creation of Diablo III, and now he’s set to depart — but he’ll be staying within the company to work on another, unannounced project.

“I recently celebrated my seven-year anniversary working on Diablo III, and while it’s been one of the most challenging and rewarding periods of my life, I’ve reached a point creatively where I’m looking forward to working on something new,” said Jay on the Battle.net forums.

“The powers that be at Blizzard have been gracious enough to give me that opportunity. Over the course of the next several weeks, I will be moving off of the Diablo III project and transitioning elsewhere within Blizzard. This decision was not an easy one for me, and not one I made quickly, but ultimately it’s what I feel is right.”

In his farewell post, Wilson expresses his pride at his work on Diablo III and the community around it, and admits to making mistakes in managing his relationship with the community. “My intent was always to provide a great gaming experience, and be as open and receptive as possible, while still sticking true to the vision the Diablo team has for the game,” he said.

“I know some of you feel we fell short of our promise to release the game ‘when it’s ready.’ While we’re not perfect, we try to make the best decisions we can with the information and knowledge we have at the time. That doesn’t mean we always make the right decisions, but if we made a mistake then I feel we’ve made an exceptional effort to correct it.”

“This is what you can always count on from Blizzard: that we will stand by our games and make every effort to continually improve them over time. We heard the feedback and suggestions from the community.”

Best of luck to Jay in his new job from all of us here at games.on.net.