You would be incorrect about the festivities, but we can't fault you for guessing!

We're very much around (and will be around tomorrow, too), but we're quite busy behind-the-scenes. We don't have much new information to share at the moment, but the development team is currently working on some content updates for an upcoming patch, and we hope to share more details on that in the near future.

(Note: We'll be releasing 1.0.6a tomorrow, but it's just a fastpatch, not a content patch. Sometimes certain issues can't be hotfixed, so we'll need a full patch to address them.)

Knock off the trolling, folks (this includes posting in all caps, calling people "idiots," etc). I can understand why you might be frustrated about tomorrow's downtime and I can certainly empathize since it's not an ideal situation, but that doesn't mean it's okay to be rude or uncivil to other posters. =/

Also, since so many of you insist tomorrow is our Christmas party (it isn't), sounds like I'll have to decorate appropriately. And potentially wear an awful holiday sweater. With lights. Oh, and one of those horrible appliques of Rudolph or one of the lesser-known reindeer. Yes.

12/10/2012 10:34 PMPosted by Oray

then why did you name the previous patch as 1.0.6 since it was the patch just like this one?

Because it contained a lot of the architecture and data needed to begin our Battle.net functionality testing: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7924401/

I believe the patch was something like 8 MBs. Not exactly small (though a lot of the content wasn't visible to players, to be fair).

This is one of these areas where you guys just set yourselves up for such easy free kicks.

1.06 should have really been 1.05b, you'd have to be blind not to realise that players expect content with major patch number increments, so why not just avoid the angst and call it 1.06b instead?

It really does seem almost like a form of masochism Blizzard indulges in sometimes.

The major difference between a normal patch and a fastpatch is what happens to the software code. Normal patches (1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3) require a new branch in our software code, whereas fastpatches (1.0.1a, 1.0.2b, 1.0.6a, etc) do not and any data included is simply added to an existing branch. This is pretty typical of how patches work for the software industry as a whole.

The reason 1.0.6 wasn't 1.0.5a was due to fact that the data we patched in for our Battle.net testing was significant enough to merit its own branch in our software code. We know that this probably felt a little weird for players -- to have a normal patch for only a small amount of visible changes -- but it was a necessary beast (so to speak). We try to avoid these situations whenever possible.