Posts with tag diablo-iii

The dedicated Diablo III fans at, uh, Diablofans.com have unearthed some files for the forthcoming patch 1.0.3 that reveal a few neat in-game bonuses, presumably intended for purchasers of the Mists of Pandaria Collector's Edition:

• A new Feat of Strength, Panda-monium, which is achieved by registering a copy of the MoP Collector's Edition.
• A new banner sigil and accent combo featuring a panda face and some pandaren-style linework.
• A pair of black demon wings, along with the string "SpecialGiftWingsBuff_name - Collectors Edition Buff." Unlike the banner options and the Feat of Strength, there's some speculation that this may not be a MoP CE reward, but the string at least raises that possibility.

If you're interested in extra items, you might want to consider buying the Collector's Edition. While the details haven't been announced yet, Wowhead recently found a quilen mount and pet that may be among the in-game CE bonuses.

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Evil has returned! 1.2 million WoW players are getting Diablo III for free thanks to the Annual Pass. You can get prepared for the evil with WoW Insider's launch coverage. From the lore of Diablo, to the important blue posts and the basics of Diablo gameplay, we'll get you on the inside track for the return of evil.

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Since the advent of gold sellers, players have discussed the ethics of buying gold with real currency, as well as what would if Blizzard started selling gold. Then came the Guardian Cub, and suddenly Blizzard was allowing gold buying and selling via a vanity pet.

Later, Blizzard hit us with the announcement that Diablo III would have an auction house that uses real money. Now that the Real-Money Auction House has been launched, the debates have heated up. This guide is to help you decide, debate, or deliberate about real money in Blizzard games.

Real-money transactions for WoW

• The implications of a real-dollar auction house
• What WoW can learn from other transaction models, part 1 and part 2
• Guardian Cub pros and cons
• WoW's immune system and the gold selling virus
• Blizzard responds to Guardian Cub controversy
• Guardian Cub pet available for purchase
• How much is a Guardian Cub worth?
• Guardian cub taking a bite out of third-party gold sales

The Real-Money Auction House is now accessible to the Americas via Battle.net balance or approved payment services for some currencies. The U.S. dollar, Australian dollar, and the Mexican peso are all supported, with the EU region and more currency from the Americas to be implemented soon.

The long-delayed RMAH will now allow players to purchase and sell in-game items using their region's currency. Your home game region will affect which RMAH you will have access to, so if you have created characters to play outside the country registered to your Battle.net account, you will not be able to use the RMAH for those characters.

Only equipment such as armor and weapons is available on the RMAH at this time. Commodities will be added at a later date. In some cases, items may be held for processing. Most items purchased will be available immediately, however.

Using the Battle.net Balance for your Real-Money Auction House transactions requires that you have an authenticator or mobile authenticator on your account. Furthermore, if you choose to use PayPal (not available in all regions), you must use the Battle.net SMS Protection feature.

To access the RMAH, go to your Campaign Screen in Diablo III and select Auction House. Then press the button that shows your region's currency. You can toggle back and forth between the gold AH and the Real-Money one.

The entire announcement from Blizzard is after the break.

You read that right: Several thousand suspensions and bans have gone out to Diablo III players using account hacks or bots or otherwise cheating at the game. Zarhym (he who often shows up in monster form while I'm playing Diablo III) posted to the official forums to announce the action.

Diablo® III Players Banned

We recently issued a round of account suspensions and bans to several thousand Diablo® III players who were in violation of the Battle.net® Terms of Use for cheating and/or using botting or hacking programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play that's essential to everyone's enjoyment of the game, botting, hacking, and other such exploitive behavior can contribute to stability and performance issues with the Battle.net service. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun online-gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed.

source

Seems fairly straightforward to me -- don't cheat, won't get banned. With the move to require an authenticator for the Real-Money Auction House and now this, it is pretty clear Blizzard is taking Battle.net very seriously moving forward.

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Evil has returned! 1.2 million WoW players are getting Diablo III for free thanks to the Annual Pass. You can get prepared for the evil with WoW Insider's launch coverage. From the lore of Diablo, to the important blue posts and the basics of Diablo gameplay, we'll get you on the inside track for the return of evil.

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It's not like it's a secret that I think the Diablo III barbarian class is chock full of ideas World of Warcraft should steal for warriors. For one thing, I just told you. That's not what you do with secrets. But it's hardly just the one class that I think has ideas worth appropriating. And better yet, when you steal from yourself, no one can complain.

Already, we're seeing in the Mists of Pandaria beta that some of these ideas are finding their way into the game. Warriors, for instance, are going to generate rage via attacks like Shield Slam or Mortal Strike or Bloodthirst rather than just via damage dealt, a change similar to the barbarian's fury gathering attacks like Cleave. Similarly, the new talent system for Mists is a lot closer to the D3 system than any of the previous ones used in World of Warcraft or Diablo II, for that matter. It's also no secret that the D2 system is written all over launch World of Warcraft, especially classes like the paladin.

So what do I think World of Warcraft should steal from Diablo III?

In order to use the Real-Money Auction House in Diablo III (which can be used to fuel your WoW subscription), you need to have a Battle.net balance set up for buying and selling items. Because Blizzard is understandably concerned about account security, an authenticator or mobile authenticator is now required in order to add to your Battle.net balance. Transferring proceeds from the RMAH to your B.Net balance will also require the use of an authenticator.

The RMAH has yet to be implemented in Diablo III, but some players have already added money to their balance in preparation for its launch. Those players will be still be able to use it to pay for eligible purchases or to use in the RMAH without the added security, but adding to the balance from now on will require adding an authenticator to their accounts.

I think that preparing beforehand for the inevitable attempted account incursions is a very responsible move on Blizzard's part. This move is good for the players, as well as good for their customer service department, I'm sure.

The full announcement is after the break.

Someone has had the audacity to hack Odin's account, and He is demanding that Blizzard restore His items immediately. In a post on the Diablo III general discussion forums, Odin insists that not only should His items and gold be returned immediately but also that a human sacrifice be performed. He blames Blizzard for giving his data away, since his system is completely secure, and therefore it must follow the rules, else be cursed.

Here's an excerpt of the All-Father's complaint:

So I'm Odin, the All-Father; I am Iron Grim, the One-Eyed. I'm the Longbeard, Lord of Ghosts, Wise One... you get the idea. My gaming rig is engraved with protective runes, and my firewall is a wall manned by Heimdell, who sees and hears any threat to the residents of Asgard. Every day at sunrise, my entire system is massaged with a poultice of angelica, burdock, comfrey, dill, and moss provided by Eir while a healing galdr is chanted over it. My ISP is two ravens that bring me news of all the happenings in the world and is always 100% stable and secure, personally watched over by the birds. Don't ask me how they do it; I'm not spending another day on that damn tree just to find out. It's powered by human sacrifice, although I have no idea how this could be relevant; I've just seen others with the same problem posting it.

Given that personal info has never been leaked by Blizzard before, it seems unlikely the hackers got the All-Father's info from anywhere but Him or one of his subjects on Asgard. He describes a seemingly impenetrable system, however, protected by magic, herbs and faithful creatures. Someone with access to His computer must have responded to a phishing email or was otherwise careless with His login info.

Three Diablo III developers stopped onto Reddit tonight for an AMAA -- "Ask Me Almost Anything" -- where they answered questions from all over the internet. Most of the questions were gameplay-related, given that these guys are developers and not dudes involved in the creative aspects of the game (story, etc). There are a lot of great answers in here: fixes coming for common complaints, overall design goals for the future, and more. Check out the full transcript after the break, but here are a few interesting points:

• Non-trash white items like potions and pages will have different item colors in a later patch, and an option to filter out trash white items completely is also being considered.
• An "auto-skip cutscenes" option is being considered.
• Bosses will drop rares the first time you kill them on any difficulty, not just normal, in a future patch.
• Legendary items are getting a big buff to be more attractive and unique.
• Auctions can be canceled in patch 1.0.3.

Bashiok recently responded to a well-written thread on the Diablo III forums. The Diablo forums are usually a wretched hive of scum and villainy (though not as bad as SWTOR), but in this case, player Matthest constructively posted a list of 35 small improvements he'd like to see implemented. Constructive criticism without histrionics is always more likely to get the attention of a blue poster.

Many of the improvements are ones that we take for granted in WoW, such as changing the font size in chat and locking the action bar. While those changes will be implemented, many other WoW features won't be due to design restrictions in the UI or a reluctance by Blizzard developers to give in to what they call "option bloat."

Personally, I would like general chat defaulted to off. I really don't want to log in and see how high Playerx is or what Lazyguy wants help with. But that's not addressed in this list.

Bashiok's full, item-by-item response is after the break.

In Diablo III's hardcore mode, when you die in the game, you die in real life. Wait, no, that's not right. When you die in the game, you lose your character forever. Kungen, another former World of Warcraft raider turned competitive Diablo player, was known for his ... exploits in the world of Azeroth for years. He recently retired from the game and, since the release of the new Diablo title, has been playing that game nearly as much as he once played WoW.

Kungen made it to level 60, began working his way through Inferno Hardcore, and met his untimely demise in the silliest possible way. His death screen states that he has spent a little over 175 hours on his hardcore barbarian, but how much of that was spent playing and how much was spent AFK or tabbed out while still logged in to the game, we don't really know. Judging by his death, maybe he should have spent a little less time tabbed out.

"The good thing," Kungen remarked, "is that I'm going to be back at the same spot in like 30 hours."

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Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks.

Diablo III is a popular video game for the PC and Mac that sold a lot of copies and made a lot of people happy. Also, there was a lot of money. With great success comes great responsibility and cost, since the amount of success becomes proportional to the amount of crap to deal with to make the operation run smoothly. Being successful in the video game industry is not always what it's cracked up to be.

This past week has shed some light on two very interesting Diablo-related news pieces, putting Blizzard and its blockbuster dungeon crawler at the heart of scandals, government raids, clever vendors, banned games, and more international intrigue. You'd think that this was all a James Bond plot, but for the presence of guys with fanny packs and an overabundance of Utilikilts.

After years of keyloggers and trojans from unsafe browsing, unsecured computers, or just plain bad luck, WoW players should be pretty used to the concept of a compromised account and how said compromises happen. Unfortunately, Diablo III players don't appear to be as familiar with them, which has resulted in some pretty maddening discourse on the official forums and across the internet.

Just like WoW accounts, Diablo III accounts are worth real money. Blizzard has had experience dealing with compromised accounts for years. This is why it introduced the Battle.net Authenticator, a second level of security that makes it very, very difficult to get your account compromised. Authenticators don't make it impossible to get your account compromised, but they do make compromising your account much more trouble than it's worth in the face of mass keylogging, which is how accounts are normally stolen.

Some people who haven't had a WoW account before but bought Diablo III were undoubtedly surprised when their accounts were compromised, which is understandable. An editor at Eurogamer had his account hacked and responded with an article suggesting that players were getting their sessions hijacked by joining public games and that people were getting compromised with this method even with authenticators attached to their account. Unfortunately, sites all over the internet picked up the story and also reported the session hijacks and bypassed authenticators as fact.

The problem is that neither of those things were correct. In fact, Blizzard says it's actually impossible to do with Diablo III due to the way the infrastructure is set up.

It's been two weeks since Diablo III was released, and if you've got some time to spare, I've got three new transmogrification outfits that might interest you. If you'll recall, two weeks ago we learned how to recreate the witch doctor, barbarian, Leah, and Deckard Cain in WoW. As promised, this week we'll be taking a stab at the monk, demon hunter, and wizard, starting with the wizard.

Making a convincing wizard outfit in WoW is surprisingly easy, provided you keep a few things in mind. First off, you need to be very aware of your character's silhouette. Bulky gloves, spiky helms, and big shoulder armor are essential, and fortunately, they're all in ample supply on Azeroth. Knowing that, you just need to keep an eye on colors. If you look at the sample outfit, you should notice right off the colors don't quite match; the golds are different hues. Let that serve as a lesson on why it's important to leave yourself a lot of options when selecting the right piece for an outfit. Mismatched hues can sometimes break an outfit if it's not balanced right.

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks.

Blizzard has been off to a pretty good start with Diablo III, selling who-cares-at-this-point millions of copies of the game people have been waiting over a decade to get their hands on. The craziest part about the whole thing is that it lived up to the hype -- a new Diablo game that felt like a Diablo game. Good for you, Blizzard! That's not what today's Lawbringer is about, no sir or ma'am. I've got a few topics I'd like to ramble on about today.

You know those days in high school when the teacher was inbetween lesson plans and they just sort of rambled to you for that one day that they had set aside in case Federico didn't understand the "green light" symbolism in The Great Gatsby? That story happened, but I changed the names to make it more funny to the people who get the joke. Great way to start off this edition, right? Make the most inside-baseball column on WoW Insider get a little more in-jokey. Mat, you sure know how to hook 'em.

No, wait, stay. I've got lots to say about Diablo III, the potential issues with the real money auction house, and my own thoughts on the cross-realm compromise and dodging the dreaded "merge." I think you'll have plenty to say in the comments after today's topics -- they are some of my favorites.