To celebrate Diablo III‘s one-year birthday, Blizzard have released an infographic detailing the staggering numbers behind the game.

The image, which you can see below, includes figures such as a total play time of over 2.8 billion hours, spread between 14.5 million unique players, who have collected a total of 648 trillion gold to date.

Take a look below for the full image (click to enlarge).

Source: Battle.net

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.

Although team deathmatch mode for Diablo III has been canned, duelling is set to come in in the next patch (1.0.7). Blizzard have now detailed how it will work, and it begins with speaking to a new NPC named Nek the Brawler in New Tristram.

Speaking with Nek will teleport you and your party to the Scorched Chapel, a new custom-built PVP zone with four distinct areas: a church, a graveyard, a river and a lake. Yourself and up to three friends can then battle in a free-for-all format.

“The game doesn’t keep score and there are no objectives,” wrote Wyatt Cheng on the official blog. “We wanted dueling to be as simple and straightforward as possible, so we created a minimalist system — we know that even without rewards and objectives, some players just want to beat each other up.”

“Some matchups may be one-sided, and we don’t expect that battles will be necessarily balanced. But that’s okay, because dueling in Diablo III is more about kicking ass and taking names in a no-holds-barred sort of way, and this design certainly allows you to accomplish that.”

Wyatt’s post also details some other changes that you’ll see in 1.0.7, including class balances for the Wizard and Monk, new crafting recipes, new gems, monster power changes, and other nitty-gritties. Check out the full post for more.

Source: Battle.net

If you’re the sort who likes to play a Hardcore character in Diablo III then you probably already live on a knife-edge and are careful to avoid anything which might kill you. Lately however, the thing that’s been killing Hardcore players are each other, through harsh use of vote-kicking.

Passing a vote-kick on a player locks them down for 10 seconds, during which they can’t move but can still be killed — locked down in the middle of a nasty melee with monsters, there’s almost no chance of survival. Well-timed vote-kicks are now apparently the tool of choice with which to dispose of your rivals (and they said PVP wouldn’t be in the game yet!).

Thankfully, Blizzard are on the case, with Lylirra posting that they are “looking to remove the 10-second movement lockout whenever a Vote Kick is passed from both Hardcore and Normal modes.”

“While we realize this solution may allow players to exploit the Vote Kick function to avoid death, it’s not a very reliable survival technique and we feel that it’s a better alternative than players losing a character they’ve invested a lot of time into due to griefing. We’ll definitely be keeping on an eye on this, though, and will consider other solutions if necessary.”

Source: Incgamers

A new blog post overnight from Jay Wilson, head honcho of Diablo III, has revealed that team deathmatch modes for Diablo III are being shelved due to a lack of depth.

“Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly,” Wilson explains in the post. “We’ve brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn’t feel like it was something they’d want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they’d want spend a lot of time in.”

Wilson also explains that Team Deathmatch mode throws a “laser focus” onto class balance, and that some issues remain in that area that they don’t feel they can adequately solve.

Duelling, however, is still on track to make it in with patch 1.0.7, which is due “sometime in the new year”. Wilson explains that the team are hard at work drafting up a replacement for team deathmatch, exploring “new modes that play up to the strengths of the character classes, focus on objectives beyond just defeating other players, and possibly even integrate PvE elements and rewards”.

Source: Battle.net

Polygon brings word that the scientitians inside Blizzard HQ now have Diablo III “up and running” on an unspecified console device and is “kind of exploring it”.

“We’ve got builds up and running on it,” said Rob Pardo, chief creative officer.

“We’re hoping to get it far enough along where we can make it an official project, but we’re not quite ready to release stuff about it, but it’s looking pretty cool.”

Meanwhile, D3‘s lead designer Jay Wilson told the site that the whole team is “working on the next big Diablo thing. A lot of that stuff will show up next year at some point.”

Source: Polygon

The upcoming Diablo III 1.0.5 patch, of which we have written about extensively, is now live on the game’s servers and you’ll need to update before you can get in.

But wait! This patch will cause your game preferences to get overwritten — so before you do, remember to back up your D3Prefs.txt file. Here’s Dankorii with the official word:

“This file can be found in the following locations:

Windows 7/Vista:
Start Menu > Documents > Diablo III folder

Windows XP:
Start Menu > My Documents > Diablo III folder

This bug has been resolved in patch versions after 1.0.5, so backing up this file should only be necessary this time around.”

Source: Battle.net

There’s nothing more exciting than a good datamine, and Diablo Fans have done just that on the upcoming 1.0.5 patch. Information gleaned includes confirmation of the 10-minute PVP arena time, as well as two teams of four-a-side. Of most interest though, is the addition of ‘PVP Tokens’, rewards gained from successful completion of PVP matches (alongside gold and experience).

PVP Tokens can be redeemed at a new NPC by the name of Gryffith, whose descriptive text in the data files reads “Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots! Spend tokens to get fat loots!”. So that’s pretty telling.

Players will also be able to earn titles, such as ‘Scout’, ‘Grunt’, ‘Sergeant’, ‘Senior Sergeant’, ‘First Sergeant’, and ‘Stone Guard’, as well as PVP-exclusive banners. Check out Diablo Fans for all the details, including some murky pictures of what upcoming maps might just look like — assuming little changes (which it inevitably will).

Source: Diablo Fans (via PCGamesN)

Although it’s not quite the offline mode that many were hoping for, the ability to appear offline so that you don’t get harassed while trying to shank as many innocent demons of Hell as possible is something that has long been missing from Diablo III.

Patch 1.0.5 will be remedying that, allowing you to appear offline to all of your friends regardless of whether they know you through RealID, BattleTag, or even just in-game as character friends. “The ‘Appear Offline’ status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game,” writes the official announcement.

“For Diablo III, we expect to add the feature in a patch after 1.0.5. For World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, we expect to add the option sometime after the release of each game’s upcoming expansion.”

Source: Battle.net

Patch 1.0.5 has now hit the Diablo III PTR, and the patch notes have hit the internet. The promised changes to defensive skills and the addition of an “Infernal Machine” that can be used to summon uber-bosses for sweet loot are in, as is the addition of a ‘Monster Power’ command that enables you to fine-tune the game difficulty on a much more granular level.

Resplendent Chests have been changed to operate similarly to Elite packs in Inferno difficulty with rewards based on stacks of Nephalem Valour, and major in-game events now grant one stack of Nephalem Valor when completed by a level 60 character on Inferno difficulty. Shrines, pets and snare effects have also been changed.

Also included in the patch notes is the promised huge nerf to the Demon Hunter’s Trail of Cinders rune, down from 1500% bonus damage to 300%. You were warned. Check out the full patch notes on Battle.net.

Source: Battle.net

Blizzard have begun to tease the general shape of changes they’re planning to make in the upcoming 1.0.5 patch for Diablo III. Primary among the changes is the “nerf that is not a nerf” teased yesterday, explained by Blizzard as “changes to defensive skills across the board while simultaneously reducing incoming damage.”

“The net result is a survivability buff for players, and an increase in build options as defensive abilities become less mandatory”.

As well as this, 1.0.5 will include a device called ‘The Infernal Machine’, which will allow level 60 players to summon uber versions of “some of Sanctuary’s most nefarious bosses” — and then try and murder them. The device will need to be assembled first, however.

Finally, 1.0.5 will add a new ‘Monster Power’ command similar to the ‘Players 8′ command that gives finer control over how challenging enemies will be. More details are expected to arrive on the Battle.net blog next week. Patch 1.0.5 is also widely expected to nerf the Trail of Cinders bug.

Source: Battle.net

The aptly-named Diablo fansite DiabloFans is claiming that they’ve received advance warning from Blizzard via their Community Manager Bashiok that patch 1.0.5 may contain things that look like huge nerfs — but will actually turn out, in greater context of some other changes — to be mad buffs, instead.

“Blizzard contacted a few fansites to inform us of a change coming with Patch 1.0.5. When we post the unofficial datamined changes for patch 1.0.5 they will appear as if a lot of classes have been nerfed. However Bashiok informs us that these nerfs will be out of context (and are not nerfs but buffs),” writes the site.

“Those changes will be compensated in other ways so that the changes actually end up as a net-buff for players.”

DiabloFans goes on to point out that the Public Test Realm download button has now been activated on the game’s launcher, which — assuming it’s not a mistake and Blizzard didn’t just flick it on too early — could hint at the possibility of upcoming PVP testing.

Source: DiabloFans

Despite the fact that Blizzard only announced the 100 bonus Paragon Levels a fortnight ago, an amibitious Barbarian by the name of Alkaizer has already maxed it out and, thus, hit level cap again.

The key to his success is apparently getting an experience gem in your helm to provide +27% bonus experience, a movement-speed bonus of around 24%, and constantly running through the following: Core of Arreat, Tower of the Damned (level l1), Arreat Crater (level l2), Fields of Slaughter (Bridge of Corsaic – WP), The Keep Depths level 2 (From level 1 WP). Here’s a YouTube video explaining it all.

Alkaizer’s recommended build is located here, and his character itself can be checked out here. Damn.

Source: PCGamesN

Crowd control effects are set to get a buff in the future of Diablo III, with a new developer post hitting Battle.net today that outlines Blizzard’s plans to tackle the issue. Currently, crowd control effects have a substantially lessened power as you advance through higher difficulties, something that Blizzard intends to correct through a reworked diminshing returns system.

The new system will add a new stat to each monster that tracks its resistance to crowd control effects, a stat that is handled individually to allow for control effects to reduce in duration with increased application. The maths behind it is a delightful insight into the difficulty of successful game design, and is an interesting read as well: take a look at the full new crowd control equations right on over here.

Source: Battle.net