From the News
Five days before Diablo III's launch, Amazon.com announced that the highly-expected hack-and-slash game from Blizzard has already made it to the very top of the list of website's most preordered games ever. Although no specific numbers were given, it all looked like analysts' predictions about 5 million copies sold within one calendar year would be buried under a much larger figure. And so they were. 4,7 million copies were distributed in the first day (including those from WoW annual passes). 6,3 million players were registered after the first week and shortly after that, the user count went up all the way to seven million.
Diablo III was certainly a groundbreaking financial success for Blizzard. It came with a prize, though.
2. Diablo III launches into Error 37
"Error 37" and its cousins were the main villains that displaced the focus away from the game and on to its many problems. The servers were unavailable to the vast majority of the buyers but that was only a dust in the shitwind that would follow.
Most players with online game experience knew that those screw-ups are nothing if not normal. Yet the "Error 37" kept returning and even nowadays is not an unfrequent visitor of the login screen. This nuisance of a cameo brought along other technical issues such as unfunctional auction house on a number of occassions, inhumanly high latency and players being thrown out of games or stuck on "Authenticating credentials". The list goes on and on and although there's been a decline in the frequency of those appearances, the bitter taste in the community's mouth is not yet washed away.
And then there was the account hacking described in paragraph #5 below.
Back to stuff that are sincerely fun, the secret pony level was discovered shortly after Diablo 3 launched. Speculations about the "new cow level" were hovering the internet for quite some time (years, really) since Blizzard came out with this art after being accused of Diablo 3 being too shiny and WoW-y.
The dispute about if the jolly graphic really persisted in the actual game, still goes on, but there's one place about which there can be no doubt. Whimsyshire, the land of killer unicorns, is a magical land where you can behead pink ponies and plushy bears and loot smiling cloud chests.
No data exists about what Blizzard were smoking but there is a detailed guide about how to get to the secret level. Just follow the link in the paragraph title and you will be taken there.
"You will be stuck on Act II for weeks," said Bashiok in one of his pre-launch posts, hyping the unsurmountable difficulty of Inferno.
Not the Method guys, apparently. Five days after Diablo III hit the shelves, the world saw the fisrt Diablo kill on Inferno at the hands of a barbarian, monk, wizard and a witch doctor.
But the impressive feat did not remain untarnished for long. People that closely followed Method's stream pointed out the use of a resplendent chest exploit in Act II and a technique that cheats around Diablo's shadow phase, essentially having two people dying deliberatly so that Diablo can spawn just two shadow clones. A quick revive follows and it's an uneven 4v2 battle in Method's favor.
With exploits or not, however, the achievement stands true - Method are the world first guild to 4-man Diablo on Inferno!
As if the shaky launch of Diablo III was not enough, players were treated to yet another unpleasant surprise - an abundant amount of account hackings, caused by players joining unhealthy public games. Characters were robbed of money and clothes with their only remaining hope being writing to Blizzard's support team and hoping that their progress can be backdated to its previous state.
To answer community's cries, Blizzard came out with a series of blue posts, essentially explaining that Battle.net itself is a safe platform and players should take extra care when protecting their accounts. Online and offline Battle.net authenticators as well as the newly introduced Battle.net SMS Protect were mentioned as the best methods of protection at company's and players' disposal and Blizzard encouraged everybody to get one. Whether or not there is an actual breach in Diablo III's public game and trade system and SQL sessions are being stolen in spite of authenticators or is it all user negligence remains to be seen.
Putting away the unpleasantries for good this time, we continue on to the "Development Hell" secret level, also known as "The Better Ending Credits". Development Hell is a rare-spawn dungeon in the Cemetery of the Forsaken (Act I) where the player gets to cut through Zombies and Wretched Mothers named after different game developers, including the enormous Unburied champion Jay Wilson, Game Director.
It's easier to access than the pony level so I suggest you read our guide and try squeezing a rare or a legendary out of Jay. Be gentle, though, the D3 team is already getting quite a beating around the forums.
Datamining was very common during the beta days as the IT brains hunger for hidden Diablo treasures drilled deep into game's files to discover secrets that ordinary users would never find. Right after the launch, the miners went quiet for a while (busy actually playing the game no doubt) until images of the PvP arenas were found among the game directories.
As you know, PvP will launch with patch 1.1. (to be released at an unspecified moment in the future) and those pictures are very small crumbs, but somehow sufficient for the time being, to feed our curiosity. Of course, nothing is ever final but this time the datamining may just be 100% correct.
These two VODs were of the first pure displays of gear superiority over Act I content that we featured on GosuGamers. Number one came from andy2tokes, a witch doctor who broke the record of Butcher's fastest kill on Inferno. He did it in nine seconds, made it onto every Diablo news site and got people talking about how imba the Witch Doctor is.
The second VOD belongs to one of the most popular Barbarians out there - Kripparrian. In a time when everybody complained about how Barbarians can't make it past Act II on Inferno, Krip laughed in their faces while soloing three elite pack at a time and making a statement about the actual Barbarian viability.
Of course, much water flowed under the bridge since then and the demonstrations of power nowadays are much more impressive. For example, you can check Athene's response to the andy2tokes' video.
To think I consider myself lucky when I get past the first couple of quests on Act II...
As Diablo III started collecting more and more criticism aimed at literally every design decision, Blizzard announced that they will be posting an article on the game changes to be implemented with the next few patches.
The post was large and thorough and addressed some of the most ailing topics such as difficulty in Inferno, the close to useless crafting system and the item generator that had weaker then blues legendary items. Justified was also the nerfing or overhauling of skills and runes than made and broke certain builds.
All in all, it was a good enough promise that the game would take the correct turn and eventually end up where everybody wants it to be. Although there were numerous issues that remained unaddressed in the article, it comes as a comfort that changes will start pouring in so soon after release.
In one of the best constructive feedback posts I've seen in a while, Battle.net user Matthest proposed 35 small improvements that could be applied to make Diablo a better game. The topic got incredibly high ratings on both Battle.net and /r/diablo and naturally, Bashiok was quick to respond to it.
From Bashiok's answers we learn a few details about Patch 1.0.3. as many of Matthest's suggestions have already been on Blizzard's to-do list such as more auction house filters and possibility to sell damaged items, resizable chat window, improvements to the social system and a buff icon for Magic Weapon. The community manager also promises to keep many of the suggestions in mind - like improved "Quick Join" system, detailed list on all auction house transactions and sold items stats, and a "build saver" - and pass them onto development team.
Even if half of the suggested improvements are taken into account and installed by the end of the year, together with the game design changes described in previous paragraph, Diablo III will start looking as the finely polished product that all the fans craved for.
From the GosuGamers oven
Our StarCraft 2 barcraft expert Eyal "KOKO" Stern took a short break from competitive RTS and wrote this amazing guide that will help all newcomers to Diablo III Hardcore. His advices soon made it to Diablo's official Facebook page, breaking all viewership records of the Diablo III section.
Not much more need be said. Read the article, heed his wisdom and if you are man enough - try it out on the harrowing fields.
In a long recently published article, our Diablo 3 writer Stefan "Devt" Kreutz sucked his teeth into the simmering topic of "Is Inferno unfarily hard or is all that whining justified". Devt discusses the current meta game, talks about which classes have it harder in the game, where does the dissatisfaction really originate from, is there a misconception of how progression through Inferno acts should occur and what direction should the tuning of Inferno take.
Devt writes: "The game is barely three weeks old and already players have progressed faster and further than Blizzard imagined they would; this is very much their own fault, as World of Warcraft serves as an excellent precedent for never underestimating your playerbase; however, it also serves as precedent for the fact that the loudest part of a population is not always the one that needs to be listened to."
The next pair of features, written by yours truly, comes as travel notes from the vintage point of a Barbarian doing his first cruise through the game's content. In "All is Normal" we put first impressions and hyped expectations on the scale, praise many of the game mechanics but also frown at peculiar or downright wrong design decisions, and discuss why Diablo III cannot get a 10/10 with the way it is now.
A week later, we returned with another "Interstate 1-60" feature, this time covering Nightmare difficulty and all its beauty. We riffle through more travel notes in oder to pinpoint which are the scariest elite packs on Nightmare, how skill builds evolve as the player progresses further and what the best itemization that'll prepare someone for Hell is.
Expect us to be back in one month time with another summary like this. Stay tuned in the meanwhile, as we certainly have even more awesome stuff prepared for June.
