WCIII Patch is Up- Diablo II Patch 1.13 Soon to Follow?

Today WarCraft III patch 1.24b has finally launched! What exactly does this mean for us Diablo fans eagerly waiting for patch 1.13 to hit Battle.net, however?

To do a quick recap, Bashiok on the official Battle.net forum board has been updating Diablo fans, somewhat inconsistently and without much information, about progress regarding the pending patch. Scant real information has been released, and even most of that is subject to change at a whim by the Legacy Team, the team behind all of the legacy game upkeep and patching (see Skill Respecs Confirmed in D2 and Patch 1.13: A Larger Inventory for Diablo II).

The first mention of the patch was some time ago in March. There was an official thread put up in the Battle.net board for members to submit their ideas for the patch (see Tell Blizzard Your #1 Diablo II Patch Note). Midway through the following month of April, Bashiok come on to the scene yet again and announced that the patch would coincide with a ladder reset, would be a content patch, and could possibly be released by the end of April (see Ladder Reset to Accompany Patch 1.13), which never happened, unfortunately. Months went by, and before we knew it, it was June. Finally, Bashiok decided to respond again (or, perhaps, was forced to), revealing that the patch was temporarily put on hold due to "higher priority issues", which many speculated to be the WarCraft III patch, 1.24b (see Patch 1.13- The Progress Update We Never Got?).

It turned out that they were right.

Another month passed and we were still lefting hanging in the beginning of July, until Bashiok replied again, this time to such ill-contained and frenzied impatience at the long delay of both the patch and any news of it of any significance that it is no surprise that the response did not garner much sympathetic support (see Blizzard Reveals Patch 1.13's Delayer). No real news was even given besides a plea for order to again be reinstated and for continued patience from the fan community, and it was confirmed that it was, indeed, WarCraft III's patch that was delaying the release.

Nearing the end of July, the PTR Forum for Diablo II's patch 1.13 finally went up (see Patch 1.13 PTR Forum is Up - Don't Get Excited, Though), confirming that the Legacy team intended on working on the patch. Unprecedented conflictions with the WarCraft III patch then came up, and Bashiok had to update the official patch 1.13 thread in the PTR Forum on Battle.net about it:


Official Blizzard Quote:



Update - 8/5

The Warcraft III patch has been released but in order to resolve some persistent issues work is not yet moving to the Diablo II patch. Again this involves some very high priority issues that need to be resolved before work can continue on D2 1.13

We'll keep you updated as work progresses.

But now, finally, WarCraft III's patch has been officially launched. By what Bashiok has said in the past, now that work on the WCIII patch has finally wrapped-up, progress should be resuming in earnest on patch 1.13. However, it could be that another marvelous intervention comes in to play. Hopefully, that will not happen, but keep up-to-date with the latest by checking the PTR Forum regularly throughout the day and week (here) and, of course, keeping your eyes glued to DiabloFans :hammy:

Thanks goes to Lethal_Weapon for PMing me about this recent development.

UPDATE (September 1, 2009):

It would appear that yet another bug has come up with patch 1.24b (see here).

Quote from Various Battle.net Forum Posters »
User #1: Whenever I try to start the Culling of Stratholme chapter, it goes straight to a black screen. There is no loading screen or anything. I easily meet the recommended requirements, so that can't be the problem. I've tried reinstalling. My drivers are up to date as well.

User #2: I experienced the same problem with Vista Ultimate SP2. Everything was fine after I reinstalled and applied the 1.24a patch, but now I can't go onto Battle.net since it will automatically apply the bad patch.

User #3: Having the same problem. Locks up trying to load The culling, actually doesn't even lock up the pc just get a black screen, no sound have to alt-tab back to windows and kill wc3. I also patched to 1.24

Tried everything that i can think up to get it to work. Nothing.



Official Blizzard Quote:



Hey, folks!

We've confirmed this is a bug and have begun the process of figuring out and fixing it.

Thanks, guys!

(Source.)

Thanks for the update goes, once again, to Lethal_Weapon.

UPDATE (September 2, 2009):

We finally have a progress update! Work has resumed on patch 1.13 and Bashiok has promised that the PTR should be up soon. What soon means, though, it's up to interpretation. If we're going by typical Blizzard standards, that could be a while :P


Official Blizzard Quote:



Update - 9/2

Work commences on patch 1.13. We won't be providing any information on when the patch will be available, except that we expect the PTR to be available "soon". We will provide some amount of warning very, very shortly before the PTRs become available. Please keep in mind that any number of factors could delay the start of the PTR and ultimate release of the patch. Thanks for being patient, we're getting close now.

Thanks goes to scyberdragon for posting this update first!

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