More Beta Changes, Bashiok on Release, and Blue Posts

More Changes
There seems to have been many changes in Patch 8 that did not make it into the notes.

General
  • Gold for quest rewards changed. (total from main quests now 503g, up from 285g; hidden event quests now give a total of 205g, up from 0g)
  • New type of chest called "Bloody Chest" (found in DiabloWiki.com - Den of Fallen Den of Fallen - seems to drop same stuff as regular chest. [Picture])
  • Grotesques no longer contribute to XP bonuses such as Mighty Blow and Massacre
  • Reduced the number of items that pop out of Haedrigs' apprentice's body
  • Ghastly Gravediggers apply a Chilled debuff in addition to knockback on their attacks
  • Cast time on DiabloWiki.com - Stone of Recall Stone of Recall shortened to 5 seconds down from 10.
  • The gold collection speed of companions is noticeably faster
  • DiabloWiki.com - Jar of Souls Jar of Souls quest wording changed to "Survive the skeletons raised by the Jar of Souls"
  • Nephalem Altar moved again, to the SE of the Waypoint in DiabloWiki.com - New Tristram New Tristram
  • New "Recommended Items" tab in the AH [Picture]
  • Stone of Recall and Nephalem Cube now rewarded at the end of 3rd quest (was end of 2nd and mid 3rd respectively)
UI
  • Different font is now used for various UI parts: floating combat text, quest tracker text, tooltips.
  • Floating combat text used to truncate decimals. Life regen ticked as +0 if below 1.0. Now only skips ticks, and displays +1 when it hits that
  • Nephalem Cube slot and Cauldron of Jordan slot in inventory UI switched places
Sounds
  • New sound for Checkpoint (changed from same sound that was used for completing a quest objective)
  • New sound for yes/no dialog prompts (like when canceling cinematics or using the Portal Stones)
Art

Blue Posts

Official Blizzard Quote:




Real Money Auction House
The reason for the RMAH being implemented is not because we want to force you all to use it, this is because we want to give you a safe, secure and Blizzard supported way of selling and buying Diablo items using real currency. If you choose not to use it because you feel it would have an ill-effect on your gameplay or for any other reason, then you do not need to. I do not feel that there is a requirement to segregate players who choose to and do not choose to use this service as it might diminish player experience or cause other problems. For example, if your friend wants to use the RMAH and you don’t, then you cannot play with them :(

It is our goal with all of our games to ensure that players have a highly enjoyable experience when playing. Due to this, we will not remove the gold Auction House, so that people can play the way they want to. One of the most important parts of the Diablo series is to obtain the best possible gear. In the past, some players would use external and potentially dangerous methods to perform real-money transactions for gear and gold in Diablo such as third-party real-money-trading organizations.

The transactions between these third-party organisations and players generally went awry, and led to a poor player experience as well as a large number of customer-service issues such as scams and item or account theft. Because we feel that it would be best to offer players an in-game and Blizzard certified way to perform these transactions in a safe and secure manner, we decided to implement the RMAH.

So just to re-iterate, even in Diablo 1 and 2, players were buying gear and gold with real-world currency, it's just more visible and safe now. It will be no different than in the past, in that you do not have to use real money at all to improve your character, however if you do decide to, it will now be much more safe and secure.

I hope this explains why we don’t want to remove one Auction house or the other, nor segregate the player bases.


Whats to stop spam bots shouting "X item in RMAH £14 now"

It's not really possible for people to spam players easily, to do so they will need to either have your Battle.Net as a friend or BattleTag ID and personally contact you. They can also go into your game if its public and talk there, or in a public channel you are in. If they do any of those though, you can simply ignore them and they will miss out in becoming friends or communicating with fine people such as yourselves.


The question I was trying to ask was how are you going to keep the two in balance?

Well, glad you asked :)
Inflation in a particular currency is fine, and for things to increase on price depending on demand is good, however as you are asking about; we do not want worthless currency.

Take for example (excuse the comparison) WoW, gold is heavily inflated but people still use it for everything, just more of it. We have many tools to ensure gold remains a worthy currency in comparison to the RMAH and vice versa. Do not worry, we will be very carefully keeping an eye out for problems with inflation and one AH becoming less valuable ^^ We have many knobs and controls at our disposal to ensure that everything works out fine! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)


Bashiok on Release

Official Blizzard Quote:



Thank you for voicing your concerns, Starbird. I realize you and many other people are excited to play the game, and are probably feeling a bit let down that we haven’t yet announced a release date. While you bring up a number of points of speculation, I just want to cut right to it and state that the reason we don’t have a release date yet is because the game isn’t yet where we want it to be in terms of our quality standards. We aren’t holding it back on account of any one piece of the game, or for any other outside factors. While it is indeed playable from beginning to end, we’re still actively working on many individual game elements and the ways that they interact with one another, with a great deal of iterative tweaking, balancing, polishing, adjusting, redesigning, and retesting going on. We’re going to continue beta testing, and before too long that’s going to include a large influx of new invites.

Much of this iteration obviously takes place behind closed doors, so I can sympathize with the concerns about the lack of visible progress, and the sentiment that we should just go ahead and ship the game. Until we’re able to reveal more of the results, I can only assure you that we are indeed working on critical game systems that directly impact the core of the experience.

I also realize a lot of people were hoping for a release date announcement at the VGAs. We’re simply not going to be able to dispel or comment on release date rumors and speculation every time someone expects an announcement. We’ll be announcing a release date when we determine the game is ready, and not holding it back just to line it up with any particular game-industry event.

The bottom line is that development of our games and preparations for release are long and complicated. We’re just as excited to get the final version into your hands as you are to play it, but making sure it lives up to our quality standards will always be the most important factor in that process.


Why not make the beta open now. Mayby all the hard fans can have a chance to ploay before release.?

The service currently available is a single test site, it just couldn't hold that many people. While we'd certainly like to make people happy, it wouldn't be a good experience, and frankly letting people try the game is not the purpose of the beta test.


Also why not tell us what your working on fixing and let the people in the beta help?

Well most everyone already knows we're working on runestones still, and we have some other changes that are going to shake up characters a little bit. We'll be letting you know as soon as we're sure they'll work out at all, and then we're going to be asking everyone for feedback.

We'll be continuing to add players to beta as we need. We recognize that there are many people that want to be a part of helping out and we appreciate that. We just aren't able to provide any particular schedule for additions.

The ongoing, concerns on timing of the release are understandable, but in some cases are a bit overblown or overly pessimistic. We recognize that it's mostly due to anxiousness and the desire to get in and stomp demons, but as Bashiok said in his post, we'll release it when we're ready. We believe it will be worth it.

We appreciate all of the constant support and enthusiasm for Diablo III and it is something that continues to inspire us to make sure we release a game we can all be happy with and have many great adventures in.
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)


Cyclone Strike
New monk ability DiabloWiki.com - Cyclone Strike Cyclone Strike

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