Diablo III Message Board older than one year ago

We told you yesterday of an exploit users had found in Diablo III that let them "dupe" gold, a serious flaw in the game's economy which forced Blizzard to shut down the game's auction houses. But just how did this exploit work? Redditor TyroPyro has a good explanation: The gold "dupe" involved creating a RMAH auction for billions of gold while staying under the $250 limit. The example I saw in a video was 6 billion gold (600 x 10,000,000 at $0.39 per stack, for $234). When they posted this auction only ~1.7 billion appeared to be for sale, with the rest "missing" until they sent it to their stash and ended up with more than they started with. The exact numbers from a duping video: Create RMAH auction for: 6,000,000,000 gold Auction shows up as: 1,705,032,704 gold This much is missing! 4,294,967,296 gold The missing amount, divided by 2: 2,147,483,648 gold 2,147,483,648 (or 231) is the maximum value you can store in an int32 in programming. I'm no programmer, but I took one class in high school and was taught about the limits of different variable types. See:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9459... Simply put, their RMAH gold selling code wasn't written to handle numbers over 2,147,483,648 properly, and the result was duplicate gold being added to people's stashes. Slightly complicated, maybe, but there you go. Some speculation on how the gold bug made it to live [Reddit, via Gamasutra]

Diablo III's in-game economy is in serious trouble tonight after users claim to have discovered an exploit in the game's latest update which lets them duplicate gold. Seems a glitch is letting people cancel a transaction in the Diablo III auction house before it's completed, with the result that any money involved is doubled. The game's forums are overflowing with users reporting/complaining about the exploit, calling for bans and rollbacks of the update as the instantaneous inflation is destroying Diablo III's economy. We've contacted Blizzard for comment, and will update if we hear back. Until then, you're advised to not spend a cent of real money in the auction house until the mess is cleaned up. Gold Dupe on the RMAH? [Diablo]

The PS3 version of Diablo III has an "exclusive pre-order bonus"—a phrase that makes me cringe every time I see it—and it's called the Infernal Helm, an artifact that boosts your experience rates so you'll level up faster. Blizzard just announced the bonus today, along with news that there's no news on a release date for the console version of Diablo III (which could be the definitive one) just yet. Just "later this year." So what do you think? Worth pre-ordering?

#diablo There are two reasons the console port of Diablo III, announced by Blizzard last month and shown off at PAX East this weekend, could be the definitive version of the game. More »

#diablo Here's the first sizzle-reel trailer for the PlayStation 3 version of Diablo III, which looks… well, about how you'd expect Diablo III to look, running on a PS3. The button assignments seem like a natural fit for the game, lending some credence to that theory that the game was designed with consoles in mind from the start. More »

#diablo Diablo III coming to PlayStation was one of the big reveals from last night's PlayStation Meeting. The fact that a PC-only release would be coming to consoles made some people angry. But, for all the rage, we didn't get an example of what Blizzard's action RPG will look like in its reconfigured form. The screens on the European Battle.net fix that. More »

#diablo One of the surprises at tonight's PlayStation 4 reveal was the announcement that Blizzard's previously PC-only Diablo III will be coming to both PS4 and PS3. More »

#diablo Diablo III statues too expensive? Build your own. That's what Samo Kramberger has done, crafting three custom pieces based on Diablo III's barbarian, monk and demon hunter. More »

#titan Bogdan Gabelko is a 3D artist who has worked for companies like Crytek. You may have seen his work before, like the Cammy piece we featured in 2011. More »

It says much about how different Blizzard’s games are from the norm that Diablo III’s lead designer, Jay Wilson, moving on from the divisive hacker-slasher to another role with the same company can be news. Blizzard’s games are designed to live for a long time, not to be abandoned after a couple of post-release patches and some token DLC. Don’t expect to see Diablo IV for at least another decade, y’know? Instead, D3 remains in a state of continuous development, catering to a large and vocal community, balancing and rebalancing to increasingly anal degrees and, no doubt, trying to become a goliath of real-money transactions. Then there’s the much-rumoured console version of the game potentially still in the wings. So, a going concern, and now in need of new leadership. A lot of people have a lot to say about Jay Wilson’s seven-year stewardship of the project, the state the game launched in and some of the big decisions (DRM, RMT, grind vs merriment) made.

Wilson obliquely referenced some of these in his long goodbye letter (again, bear in mind he was moving to a different part of the same building rather than another developer), and while it’s full of pride about the game too it’s probably the closest we’ll ever come to Blizzard admitting that D3 wasn’t their finest hour.(more…)

#diablo Earlier this week, Jay Wilson, the director of Diablo III said he was leaving the title while still remaining at its publisher, Blizzard. There was a lot of cheering in the game's official forums, because video games are not that different from sports, where fans openly root for people to lose their jobs after a disappointing year. And Diablo III, whose development history stretched more than a decade, was dogged by technical problems, a dissatisfying endgame, and an always-on Internet requirement deeply resented by those most likely to shout their disappointment. More »

#diablo Jay Wilson, longtime Blizzard employee and the director of Diablo III, has stepped down after seven years on the game. Wilson will move to another project at Blizzard. More »

You! Yeah, you! I am enraged in you general direction. Are you manly enough to fight me? Yeah? Crap. I thought you might back down and run away. Erm. Can I interest you – OW! – please stop, and I’ll pay you – NOTTHEFACE – I have money! Take my watch! It’s my birthday and I’ve just wet myself. Just please stop pummeling me… Man, did I just learn a lesson: real-world violence solves nothing, causes bruising and pain, and might even result in soiled underwear. From now on I’ll be doing all my fighting online, and Blizzard will soon make it possible to do so in Diablo III. The next patch will deliver a basic PvP structure to their game. Finally!(more…)

#diablo Diablo III's Team Deathmatch mode—shown off at a number of conventions and promised for the months following the game's launch earlier this year—has been axed, Blizzard says. More »

#blizzard It's not just those who have worked at Blizzard for 5, 10 or 20 years that get awesome presents. A lot of other people do as well. More »

#diablo Jean-Baptiste Monge is an accomplished fantasy illustrator, whose sketchbook style makes his drawings look as much like field journal entries as works of art. More »

#diablo The world of Diablo III is a little less mechanical today, with Blizzard having made recent steps to ban a ton of people who were using bots. More »

#blizzard If you thought the glass controller Sony employees got after five years of service was a nice gesture, wait til you see what Blizzard employees get for twenty years service. More »

#google One of the most interesting ways of determining the popularity of something is to see how many people are looking for information on it via Google. So let's see what the search engine has to tell us about what people were looking for in 2012. More »

#diablo First shown off in unpainted form earlier this year, Sideshow's enormously fancy Diablo statue, from Diablo III, is finally going on sale this Thursday. More »

#diablo Blizzard has taken down Diablo III's gold and real-money auction houses for "emergency maintenance". The company isn't providing any ETA on when they'll be back up. More »

Well, that didn’t take long. Hackers sneaked past Blizzard’s hyper-sophisticated security system – presumably by cinematically lowering themselves from a cyber-ceiling to avoid all the e-lasers – and people weren’t too terribly happy about that. Unsurprisingly, a couple of them decided to sue. Unsurprisingly-er, Blizzard’s replied not by groveling and begging for heartfelt forgiveness, but instead by whipping out its fightin’ words pistols and shooting down the whole thing.

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I suppose it had to happen eventually. Blizzard‘s done a rather miraculous job of keeping hackers at bay for quite some time, but this year saw a few too many blemishes muddy its track record. So naturally, it’s lawsuit time. Specifically, the two plaintiffs target a May admission of an increase in account compromises on Blizzard’s part and August’s rather messy Battle.net breach. Then they take aim at what they believe to be the all-too-achey-breaky heart of the matter: authenticators.

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Today, Blizzard got on a phone and opened its collective mouth, and as so often tends to happen when these factors combine, words came out. Instead of glorious operatic ovations or beat poetry, however, the words somewhat surprisingly took the form of videogame announcements. And the games in question? Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. Madness, right? What a world we live in! What a world. Ride the break down into the frightful depths of uncertainty for the full blow-by-blow.

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#diablo Reader Oliver spotted this DVD case staring out at him from the Hispanic section of his local Walmart. More »

It’s been a long time since Blizzard added a new string to its bow o’universes, but not so long ago a fourth franchise was on the cards. In the time-honoured tradition of fantasying up Warcraft into Starcraft, so at one point was Diablo to be sent to space, in a game that never quite made it past the unfortunate portmanteau working title ‘Starblo.’(more…)

#diablo Via tipster Andrew M., here's a Tristam light show chock full o' legendary items. Brought to you by the latest Diablo III patch. More »

All in all, I’m pretty happy not being The Devil Himself. It’s a sentiment that’s followed me through each day – from dusk ’til dawn – for quite some time, but Diablo III gave me renewed appreciation for my frail, non-red flesh and lack of dominion over the most miserable location ever conceived. I mean, it’s bad enough having every righteous hero’s target on your back, but when they start Paragon leveling and optimizing builds, well, why even get out of your bed assembled from the twisted, eternally weeping faces of ten thousand racists who constantly insist they aren’t racist? Blizzard, though, is hoping to put some challenge back into not only the Big Bad himself, but every single zone in its exceedingly beaten and battered hack ‘n’ slash.

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#diablo Blizzard considered making a game called Diablo Junior, ShackNews reports today. Not to be confused with the Whopper Junior. Or Carl's Jr. More »

#torchlight I've spent the weekend mainlining Runic's Torchlight II. As of this writing, my level 39 engineer has killed 8,800 monsters, collected 161,207 gold, imbibed 535 potions, broken 771 crates and urns, and caught 9 fish. More »