one life to live
The night Hardcore lived up to its name, left comrades dead and my nerves in shreds.
monster density in 1.0.8
Observations on changes coming in 1.0.8 and the effect of an increased monster density

Latest Diablo 3 News

Blizzard Offers Diablo 3 Social Tool Tips


4
Posted 11 May 2013 by Flux at 15:39 GMT

Patch 1.0.8 added a bunch of new Battle.net social options, and many players have questions about how they work. Thus the CMs have been offering helpful tips which you might find useful.

Join a multiplayer player public game. Any act, any type. Press ESC. Like you want to leave. Open game to public is Unavailable. Now why is that?
Grimiku: Making a game session publicly available can be a little confusing, but I’ll try to clear it up a bit. The option is greyed out in existing public games because it’s already been activated and can’t be edited (i.e. changing it from Monster Slaying to Brawling) or turned off. The option will be available if you want to turn a solo session or a private multiplayer session into a public game, but only the party leader can do that if you’re in a group. I hope that helped!

How come no public games in ACT 2?

Its actually the better act. The invisible mobs in Dalgur Oasis haven’t been nerfed and they come in HUGE groups which means loot and xp….yet I see everyone on act 1?
Grimiku: I’ve been having a lot of fun playing public games (Act II included) since patch 1.0.8, and haven’t had any problems finding a game to join. I have a suggestion that might help you find Public Games if you don’t care what quest they’re on.

In patch 1.0.8, we added a feature to Public Game quest selection called “Any Quest” to help players quickly join games and get into the action, and here’s how to find it if you haven’t seen it yet. After clicking the “Public Games” option you’re prompted to select a quest, and each Act now has an option called “Any Quest” at the top of its quest list (you can also select “Any Act- Any Quest” at the very top). I hope this helps you find games with like-minded Nephalem to adventure with!

Elsewhere, a fan brought up a bug that’s been bugging me. I don’t know the point in posting about this in the general forum when it’s obviously a bug report, but at least now we know that fixing it is on the agenda.

Item drop display. Why cant i toggle for it to show it for 10 seconds anymore. It automatically switches to Push to show.
There is a bug with the “Item Label Display” option that’s causing it to automatically revert to “Push to Show” no matter what you select. We’ve been looking into it and have a solution, but we still need to find a good time to deploy it since it requires a client side patch. We’ll update this thread as soon as we have more information to share about it.

Have you guys played with the new social tools? Along with the ones mentioned above, you can now set a sort of “away” IM message that others on your friends list see when they log on. I don’t know if the profanity filters work on it, but you’re free to try if you want to leave a special greeting for a special someone.


Latest Diablo 3 News

Gold and Real Money Auction House Now Live


Posted 11 May 2013 by Elly at 04:21 GMT

Good news traders, both US Auction Houses are live once again, however there are a couple of temporary limitations still in place.

Maintenance has concluded, and both the gold and real-money Auction Houses are now live. Gold trades have also been reactivated. Please note that we have temporarily reverted the stack size for gold on the real-money Auction House from 10,000,000 to 1,000,000. (At the moment, there’s an active bug preventing gold stack sizes from displaying correctly in the Auction House at values higher than 1,000,000, so we’ve temporarily reversed this change the until we can fix it.)

Important: To help reduce load and improve the overall stability of the auction house system, the game may temporarily limit traffic to the auction house, especially following maintenance. This is done automatically, and players may occasionally see a grayed-out auction house button as a result. If the auction house button is grayed-out, please wait a few minutes and then try again.


Latest Diablo 3 News

Gold Dupe Audit Still Ongoing, No Diablo 3 Auction House Yet


3
Posted 11 May 2013 by Flux at 01:11 GMT

Blizzard kept pretty quiet today, but did provide one update on the ongoing process of fixing the gold cheat damage and restarting the Diablo 3 Auction House.

5/10/13 3:25 p.m. PDT: We’ve made substantial progress with our audit, but the process is not yet complete. We don’t yet have a specific ETA as to when the Auction Houses will be available, but we wanted to at least touch base with the community and let you all know that we’re still working hard to address the effects of the gold dupe. We’ll be providing another status update by 7:00 p.m. PDT, as well, so be sure to stay tuned to this thread. Thank you!

It’s now Friday evening. The patch went up Tuesday morning, and Blizzard noticed the duping and shut down the AH Tuesday evening. Thus it’s been 3 full days of this “audit” with no end in sight. To my surprise, the most popular choice in our poll yesterday was agreement with Blizzard. As the AH downtime continues, I wonder if that opinion is beginning to slip?

What should Blizzard have done to fix the RMAH gold dupe bug?

View Results

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I voted for that option myself, partially since I found a Zuni’s chest piece Tuesday evening worth about 70m (HC). But as the days without the AH add up, I’m growing more to wish Bliz had just spent all Tuesday night + Wednesday resetting everything. And I don’t personally care about the already-gold-farmer-flooded SC economy, which is the only reason for Bliz to do this “fix” at all.

Tagged As: | Categories: Auction House, Blue Posts, Diablo 3 Hacks | 3 Comments

Latest Diablo 3 News

Diablo 3 Monster EXP and Item Drops Nerfed (a bit) in v1.0.8


Posted 10 May 2013 by Flux at 14:23 GMT

Blizzard mentioned in the DiabloWikiPatch 1.0.8 notes that lots of monsters, mostly in Acts 1 and 2, had their experience and drop rates turned down a bit. There’s been debate about this in the forum, after so many months of Acts One and Two being useless, but I think the Devs’ logic is pretty obvious.

They wanted Acts 1-3 to be (roughly) equivalent in value, in v1.08. Act 3 got no buffs in monster density, and got a debuff in exp value when scorpions were nerfed a bit. Acts 1-2 got a 2-3x buff in monster density, thus the exp/item value for those monsters had to be turned down some, or else Acts 1-2 would have become vastly more profitable than Act 3. You could argue that such a fate was justified and deserved, after the past inequities suffered by the lands of Tristram and Caldeum, but the devs wanted balanced variety of Acts. Hence nerfs to exp-per-monster in Acts 1 and 2.

Note that Elites still have their same guaranteed drops, so the item drop changes below apply only to trash mobs.

Experience granted by the following monsters has been reduced to better match their HP:

By 75% for:

  • Brood Hatchlings, Cavern Spiders, Spiderlings, Stygian Crawlers, and Tormented Stingers
  • By 60% for:

  • Accursed, Betrayed, Blazing Ghouls, Ghouls, Murderous Fiends, Reviled, Savage Fiends, and Vicious Ghouls
  • By 50% for:

    Bile Crawlers, Crazed Cultists, Crazed Summoners, Dark Conjurers, Dark Cultists, Dark Summoners, Dark Zealots, Deranged Cultists, Doom Wraiths, Enraged Zealots, Fallen, Fallen Grunts, Fallen Peons, Fallen Soldiers, Foul Conjurers, Ravenous Dead, Shade Stalkers, Shadow Vermin, Skeletal Crawlers, and Spine Lashers

  • By 40% for:

  • Dark Moon Clan Impalers, Moon Clan Impalers
  • By 34% for:

  • Blazing Guardians, Charged Constructs, Chilling Constructs, Frost Guardians, Noxious Guardians, Shock Guardians, Smoldering Constructs, and Toxic Constructs
  • By 25% for:

  • Dust Shamblers, Hungry Corpses, Retching Cadavers
  • The chance for the following monsters to drop loot has also been reduced to better match their HP:

    By 60% for:

  • Accursed, Betrayed, Blazing Ghouls, Ghouls, Murderous Fiends, Reviled, Savage Fiends, and Vicious Ghouls
  • By 50% for:

  • Bile Crawlers, Crazed Cultists, Dark Cultists, Dark Zealots, Deranged Cultists, Doom Wraiths, Enraged Zealots, Fallen, Fallen Grunts, Fallen Peons, Fallen Soldiers, Ravenous Dead, Shade Stalkers, Shadow Vermin, Skeletal Crawlers, and Spine Lashers
  • By 40% for:

  • Dark Moon Clan Impalers, Moon Clan Impalers
  • By 34% for:

  • Blazing Guardians, Charged Constructs, Chilling Constructs, Frost Guardians, Noxious Guardians, Shock Guardians, Smoldering Constructs. and Toxic Constructs
  • By 25% for:

  • Brood Hatchlings, Cavern Spiders, Crazed Summoners, Dark Conjurers, Dark Summoners, Dust Shamblers, Fallen, Fallen Grunts, Fallen Peons, Fallen Soldiers, Foul Conjurers, Hungry Corpses, Retching Cadavers, Spiderlings
  • There’s discussion of this in the forums as well, but my experience thus far in v1.08 has been of much greater profits (in exp and items and fun) running Acts One and Two than I was getting in Act Three in v1.07. The monster density is nice, the content is easier (Act 1 especially feels at least 1 MP lower in diff than Act 3) and it’s great to have something different to farm.

    You guys may have drawn different conclusions, and we’re going to post a vote to rate initial v1.08 impressions and experiences. Probably early next week, to give everyone some time to test it out over the weekend.


    Latest Diablo 3 News

    Diablo 3 Auction House Still Down: Investigation Continues


    Posted 10 May 2013 by Flux at 01:47 GMT

    More updates from Blizzard on the progress they’re making in undoing the gold boosting exploit from Tuesday’s patch gogo time.

    5/9/13 12:10 p.m. PDT: As we mentioned earlier, we’re currently auditing transactions that were performed on the both the gold and real-money Auction House following the discovery of a gold exploit after patch 1.0.8 released. For those just tuning in, we decided to perform a complete audit and focus on the few players that exploited this bug rather than performing a full rollback and taking everyone offline for a day (or more) – losing all the progress they made.

    This audit is a time-intensive process, and to make sure that we can do a thorough job, we’re going to keep the Auction Houses in maintenance until that work is complete. Unfortunately, our previous estimate was incorrect, and for that I personally apologize. We don’t have a new ETA, but we anticipate that the service will be unavailable for at least another 24 hours. We’ll continue to provide updates in this thread regarding the status of our Auction House maintenance as they become available.

    5/9/13 9:00 a.m. PDT: We are still in the process of reviewing all of Tuesday’s transactions and need to keep the Auction House offline for a while longer to complete our audit. At this time, we will not be able to bring the Auction House online by 10:00 a.m. PDT. We’re re-evaluating required downtime, and will provide another update by 12:00 p.m. PDT.

    So, are we happy with this approach? I threw a variety of options into the vote, but be sure and use the comments to complain that your particular weird idea isn’t represented.

    What should Blizzard have done to fix the RMAH gold dupe bug?

    View Results

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    The delays are not sitting well with some players, and there are a lot of requests for public shaming of the cheaters, as well as many people who wished they’d just done a full rollback, both to get it over with quickly, and to completely cut the head off the snake of gold inflation.

    List of tags followed by stage of investigation, how much they duped, level of punishment.
    Lylirra: Gonna come right out and say it: No. This is not something we will do. Full stop.

    Even if a player does something that very clearly merits a suspension or ban, we still value that person’s privacy and aren’t going to publicize what (if any) action we have taken in response. There are times where we will speak in general terms, but is not our policy (nor our preference) to discuss personal account information with anyone but the account holder. Ultimately, that kind of dialogue exists between Blizzard and the player, not Blizzard and the community.

    This is not a witch hunt.
    There will be no public shaming (so put down your pitchforks).
    Any further threads encouraging harassment of other players will be locked or deleted.

    Thanks. :)

    Hey, let’s double vote this. Do you guys agree with the policy outlined by Lylirra?

    Should Blizzard make public the punishments of gold exploiters?

    View Results

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    Slightly OT, but I’m having trouble imagining the level of complaints we’re going to see tomorrow when the Auction House goes back online and all of the gold “adjustments” are made to undo the duping and buying. No one’s going to shed a tear for the super rich who actually ran the exploit, but when/if 1) everyone who sold a gem for 1 billion gold loses that gold, and the gem, and gets a few days ban from playing, and/or 2) those people are not punished and get to keep their gains… the complaints on both sides of the issue may be audible from outer space.

    Yes, space. Where no one can hear you rabblerabble.


    Latest Diablo 3 News

    Barbarian Inspiring Presence Lacks Inspiration, Presence


    6
    Posted 9 May 2013 by Flux at 21:00 GMT

    The Barbarian’s DiabloWikiInspiring Presence passive skill got a buff in v1.08, though it wasn’t a huge one. On the PTR that skill briefly went up from 2% to 4% life regen per second, and shared the benefit to the party. This effectively gave the Barbarian the best Aura shared Aura in the game (much better than the Monk’s DiabloWikiMantra of Healing > DiabloWikiSustenance, which used to restore 612 life per second, but was boosted to 1240 in v1.08). Such a buff proved too big even for the Barbarian though, and the benefit was rolled back to 2%, though the Aura effect remained, so that boost now shares to everyone in the party.

    A useful change, but the visual indicator changed as well, which is giving some players confusion.

    So they added a cool feature to inspiring presence, thumbs up. But now we don’t even receive life regeneration from the passive, thumbs down. Fix this bug please, the description is right but our life regen has no increase… tested in battle as well not regening 2% life at all.. Anyone else seeing this on their barb?
    Grimiku: So, we’ve seen multiple posts from players saying that Inspiring Presence is not affecting the Barbarian or other party members. When these posts first started to appear, we were pretty darn sure everything was working correctly. Your reports mean a lot to us, though, so we decided to hop into the game to do some testing of our own. We were able to confirm that everyone in the party was benefiting from the appropriate amount of additional regeneration, but the way Inspiring Presence it works in 1.0.8 visually is a little tricky. It now works similarly to a heal-over-time spell, which prevents it from updating in the details section of the character stat window.

    I think it’s important that I let you know how we tested it, so you can see it for yourself. The first step is to turn on Healing numbers. You can do this in Options > Gameplay > Display Healing Numbers. Make sure you have no Shouts activated, and remove a piece of gear with Vitality on it. Once you put that piece of Vitality gear back on, you should notice a green number floating off of your characters head, and that’s how much Life you’re regenerating every half second. Next, perform a Shout that will activate Inspiring Presence, and you (and your party members) should notice a distinct increase in that number.

    We agree that this can be confusing for players, so we’re taking a look at how to make those values more noticeable. Beyond that, we don’t have any additional information about if or when Inspiring Presence will update the Life Regeneration stat in the character pane, but we’ll let you know when we do.

    I haven’t tried this out yet since it’s impossible to be below max health with a Barb I haven’t dusted off my Barb yet in v1.08, but I always play with the damage and healing and other hps displays on, so I’m sure I’d notice it. Do others not like to see the numbers all the time, and run in silent visual mode, thus potentially missing the benefit?

    Tagged As: | Categories: Barbarian, Blue Posts, Grimiku, Skills, Traits | 6 Comments

    Latest Diablo 3 News

    More Official Updates on the Diablo 3 Duping and AH Issues


    Posted 9 May 2013 by Flux at 00:39 GMT

    Blizzard has added a few more updates to the official thread that holds all of our virtual lives hanging in the balance.

    5/8/13 4:15 p.m. PDT: In order to allow auctions posted yesterday to expire naturally, we’ve decided to keep the gold and real-money Auction House in maintenance mode until tomorrow morning. We’re currently targeting 10:00 a.m. PDT, but will provide an update for everyone at 9:00 a.m. PDT. At that point, we’ll be able to give a much more solid ETA as to when the service will be up and running.

    Gold trades are still disabled for the time being. Once we have an ETA for those being re-activated, we’ll provide another update in this thread, as well.

    5/8/13 11:30 a.m. PDT: We’re still in the process of auditing Auction House and gold trade transactions. We realize this is an inconvenience for many of our players, and we sincerely apologize for the interruption of the service. We hope to have everything back up as soon as possible. We don’t currently have an ETA for when the Auction House will be brought out of maintenance or gold trades will be reactivated, but we’ll continue to provide updates in this thread as they become available.

    5/8/13 12:30 a.m. PDT: We’ve confirmed that we’ve fixed the bug which allowed players to duplicate gold; however, we will be keeping the gold and real-money Auction Houses offline in the Americas until further notice (gold trades will also remain suspended). We’ll be using this downtime to perform audits on all transactions conducted through the Auction House as well as trades in which gold was exchanged since 1.0.8 launched. We anticipate this process will take multiple hours to complete and will provide another update by 12:00 p.m. PDT.

    Earlier Blue posts in this thread can be seen here.

    So they’ve disabled all gold trading and AH transactions until they finish the audit and refresh/reset/rollback/smite as much as possible of the illicit gold. Obviously no one is happy about this whole thing, but it seems to me that they’re handling the aftermath about as well as can be expected. We didn’t get rolled back, we’re able to play while they’re fixing the problem, and they’re going after the individuals who exploited, rather than hurting us all.

    The big question, of course, is if they’ll “get” enough of the duped gold to keep the economy from a huge hit of deflation. And it’s going to be hard to tell, since v1.08 also ushered in a (potential) 10x devaluation of gold value, with the RMAH changing from 1 million to 10 million for the base gold transaction. I don’t know if there’s so much surplus gold in circulation that the RMAH gold price will instantly drop from 1m = $.25 to 10m = .25, but if it drops that far, or even just down to say, 5m = $.25, it’s going to instantly cause huge increases in gold prices for all softcore auctions. And I’m sure many people will blame gold duping for that.

    Happily, we’ve got other ways to compare/check. There’s no RMAH for hardcore, so we can see how that economy shifts once the GAH is back online, and the v1.08 gold duping bug didn’t exist at all on Europe, so any big shifts in gold value there will be purely due to the 1m to 10m change on RMAH gold sale quantities/prices.


    Update: A fan posted a reasonable explanation for how/why the gold duping bug worked. It was only possible when listing gold sales on the RMAH vastly in excess of the amount the game actually processed, due to a bug, and did not exist in the PTR version (no RMAH there), and it was a last minute patch change related to the 1m > 10m gold sale limit. Click through for the quote:

    read more


    Latest Diablo 3 News

    Blizzard’s Official Statement on Diablo 3 Gold Duping


    Posted 8 May 2013 by Flux at 05:40 GMT

    Blizzard has issued an official statement on the v1.08 Diablo 3 gold duping and the current situation with the shuttered Auction House. Key points from their posts:

  • There will not be a general rollback. If you didn’t dupe gold and progressed your character since the patch went live, your progress is safe.
  • The gold dupe existed only on the Americas Realm (not on Asia or EU) for a few hours after v1.08 went live.
  • Blizzard says that only a small number of players took advantage of the exploit and thus they are handling bans, rollbacks, and other corrective actions on a case-by-case basis.
  • The Gold and Real Money Auction Houses should be back online fairly soon.
  • Full blue quotes below:

    UPDATES:

    12:00 a.m. PDT: At this time (and after careful consideration), we’ve decided to not move forward with rolling back the servers. We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it, and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region. We’ve been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections.

    While this is a time-consuming and very detailed process, we believe it’s the most appropriate choice given the circumstances. We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning.

    10:40 p.m. PDT: Maintenance has concluded, and the fix has been implemented. Once we’ve been able to test this fix and verify that it works correctly, we’ll then mark the gold and real-money auction house live.

    10:35 p.m. PDT: To assist our teams with their review process, we have disabled all gold trades in the Americas region until further notice. Players can still trade items, but trades that involve any sum of gold currency cannot be completed.

    10:15 p.m. PDT: We believe we’ve found a fix for the gold duplication bug and will be deploying it shortly to all regions. In order to implement this fix, we’ll be bringing Diablo III into maintenance. We anticipate this maintenance will last for approximately 1 hour, lasting until approximately 11:30 p.m. PDT.

    _____________________________________

    Auction Houses Temporarily Offline — Update

    We’ve brought both the gold and real-money Auction Houses offline for maintenance. After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we found that some players were exploiting a bug that enabled them to duplicate gold through the Auction House. We’re working on fixing the bug right now, and bringing the Auction Houses offline helps us troubleshoot in a more stable environment while preventing further exploiting.

    Q. When will the Auction House be available?
    We don’t have an ETA just yet. Our priority at the moment is (of course) to fix the bug and make sure it can’t happen again. We know this is an inconvenience for some of our players, so we’ll be providing updates in this thread as soon as we have any details to share.

    Q. Will there be a rollback?
    Our priority is to fix any issues with the game client first—that’s what we’re working on right now. After we’ve addressed the situation, we’ll need to determine whether or not a rollback is appropriate. We know this is an important issue for all of our players, so we’ll be sure keep you informed of what’s happening and will provide any updates in this thread, as well.

    Q. Will players be banned for using this dupe?
    We’re currently in the process of reviewing the accounts involved and taking appropriate actions, including temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans. Our exploitation policy for Diablo III can be found here, which should give you an overview of the kinds of activities that are and aren’t cool within the game.

    Thank you for all of your reports, and for your patience. In the meantime, to help streamline communication, we’re going to be locking and redirecting posts to this location.

    Sounds like we’re free to play now without worry of our progress being rolled back. You’d be wise to avoid any third party item or gold sales, since you’ll probably be buying duped gold, or items purchased with it. And who knows where the ban hammer and/or rollback will fall?


    Latest Diablo 3 News

    Diablo 3 Gold Dupe Bug


    Posted 8 May 2013 by Flux at 01:16 GMT

    Along with the amusing bugs, the Patch 1.0.8 brought along a serious one; a way for players to dupe gold by posting and then canceling items in the Auction House. The Auction House has now been taken down and there is much player speculation about roll backs or other radical steps to fix the economic destruction.

    Blizzard hasn’t yet commented other than with their default security message, but hopefully we’ll get more news on this shortly.

    Reporting possible hacks, exploits, or cheats these issues is incredibly important to us, but at the same time, we ask that players please remember to report them through the proper secure channels. As stated in this sticky, and the Forums Code of Conduct, under NO circumstances should a hack or exploit be reported on the public forums.

    If you believe you have information pertaining to a possible dupe or exploit, we ask that you please email hacks@blizzard.com with the steps you used so that we can investigate the issue. Thanks for your help!
    vaeflare you do relaise this is real, there is guy on stream that just made 420bil gold in less than a minute.

     

    How long will the auction house be down?
    Vaeflare: We don’t have a current estimate at this time.

    Just speculating, but you might not want to play until we hear more about this. If Blizzard does have to make some sort of realm-wide rollback to erase the duped gold, anything you accomplish between now and then might be erased.

    Update [4:00GMT] : The patch is live on the EU servers now, we assume sans the gold bug which would suggest Blizzard have a fix for the bug to apply to the US server.  No word on this or what will happen, if anything, to the trillions of gold duped or the accounts taking full advantage of the exploit.


    Latest Diablo 3 News

    Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.8 Bug: Character Display


    7
    Posted 8 May 2013 by Flux at 00:51 GMT

    There are always some issues with new patches, and DiabloWikiv1.08 is no exception. The game features seem to be working, after their PTR testing, but many players are experiencing issue with logging in and with changing characters. Often with humorous visuals.

    Lylirra: We’re currently looking into two issues that are affecting players who’ve patched up to 1.0.8:

  • Item Label Display is reverting back to “Push to Show” after changing it to another setting.
  • When trying to switch to a different character, the character model (including its class, gender, name, and banner) in the menu does not update, but equipped gear will. This appears to simply be a visual bug, as joining a game session will use the correct character.
  • We’ll be sure to provide an update in this thread once we’ve more information. In the meantime, thank you for your reports! To help keep the conversation streamlined (this will help us talk to you better, and vice-versa), we’re going to be locking and redirecting posts to this location.

    Another bug is that barbarian Inspiring Presence may or may not be affecting the barb himself. This was reported in the PTR forums as a bug, and is believed to be simply a tooltip/display issue, but it would be nice to have it confirmed. Is everyone but the barb getting the buff, or is the barb also getting it, too?
    Grimiku: Thanks for the report. We sent this up so it could be looked at as well. Of course, as soon as we have an update we’ll let you all know. Thanks again!

    Various players have submitted cool screens of the display bug, showing one character equipped with the gear from another character, and they’re good for a laugh. Two examples below; if anyone else has a good one put the link in comments and I’ll add to the gallery.


    Wiz with WD weapons.

    Wiz with WD weapons.

    DH dual-wielding melee tools.

    DH dual-wielding melee tools.