DiabloFans Is Nominated For Most Educational Stream!

Our Twitch stream has been nominated by Blizzard in the category "Most Educational Stream" in Blizzard's Stream Awards for 2013! If you'd like to give us a chance at winning, click here and vote for us. As a sign of our gratitude we'll make sure to stream in at least one of the upcoming days. Check out the other categories as well and let us know what you'd like to see in our stream!

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker/ Official Forums)

2013 was a great year for the Twitch streaming community, and many Twitch streamers have dedicated themselves to creating unique content based on Blizzard games. In recognition of their efforts, Blizzard is proud to announce the 2013 Blizzard Stream Awards powered by Twitch. These awards will provide recognition and cash prizes for the best Blizzard content streamers of 2013. Award nominees will be announced on Thursday, January 30 (today), and award winners will be announced on Friday, February 7, right here on Blizzard's official community sites and on Blog.Twitch.tv. For a list of awards categories and to learn how the 2013 Blizzard Stream Awards powered by Twitch works, check out the breakdown below. 

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How It Works:

• Award Categories: Together, Blizzard and Twitch have established 14 unique award categories representing streamers from four Blizzard franchises (Diablo III, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft). Half of these categories are data-driven (example: Most Number of Hours Streamed for Blizzard Titles in 2013) while the other half are qualitative categories that will be voted on by you, the community (example: Favorite Community Show of 2013).
• Prizes: In this program, Twitch will distribute a prize pool of approximately $45,000 for 2013 Twitch partner streamers, and prizes will be distributed evenly to each award category.
• Implementation: Voting will occur for the seven poll categories through Wednesday, February 5, 2013, via the polls linked below. After voting has closed, we will announce the winners of both the polled categories and the data-driven categories.
• Rules: To qualify for the 2013 Blizzard Stream Awards presented by Twitch, you must be a Twitch partner streamer who streamed game content from one of the four Blizzard franchises (Diablo III, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft) between January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2013.

Poll Categories: 

Please vote for your favorite Blizzard content streamers.

• Favorite New Streamer of 2013
• Best Community Show of 2013
• Most Educational Stream
• Favorite StarCraft II Stream
• Favorite Diablo III Stream
• Favorite Hearthstone Stream
• Favorite WoW Stream

Data Driven Categories:

We will announce the categories, winners, and runners-up for seven data driven categories of awards next week. These are being tabulated by Twitch’s glistening army of robots and number crunchers.

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Thank you to everyone that streamed or watched Blizzard games on Twitch in 2013. Support your favorite personalities by following the links above and voting, and please continue to watch their streams on Twitch in 2014.  If you'd like to share your unique personality and gameplay experiences, we encourage you to become a Twitch partner. Visit this link for more information. 

Upcoming Hellfire Ring Changes

A pretty exciting update was posted by Nevalistis on the Official forums regarding the new Hellfire Ring and the changes coming to the system!

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Official Forums)

New day, new topic!

- Hellfire Ring farming system for everyone. (suggestions for the process of obtaining the rings, in hopes of not repeating the vanilla mistakes)
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/11307480873

There's a lot to cover on this topic, so bear with me. Incoming Wall o' Text!

First off, I want to stress that the intent behind the Hellfire Ring system is to exist as end-game content. It's not necessarily meant for everyone - not everyone enjoys that style of play. It offers a cool reward for those who are dedicated to completing the journey, and gives you an easily identifiable goal.

It's also not meant to be something you complete in the first week of launch. It should be challenging, and take time to conquer. It should also get more rewarding at higher difficulties, and I'll cover that a bit below. All said, there was definitely room for improvement and we've learned a lot from the first iteration of the Infernal Machine event.

Let's use bullet points, because they're pretty and organized: 

• The new Hellfire Ring will not have a level requirement on it. The current level requirement is actually a bug and not intended.
• The new Hellfire Ring is guaranteed to offer both the Legendary proc (which scales with weapon damage) and bonus experience.
• Like all crafted items, it will also roll with Smart Loot rules when created, so you can be sure your Barbarian won't craft something that was more useful for a Demon Hunter. (Just be sure to craft on the character you want to use it on!)
• Infernal Machines are now crafted for specific portals, so you can focus your efforts on the encounters that drop the crafting materials you need most.
• Remember that the 100% drop rate for Keys and Crafting Materials is purely for testing purposes at this time. As of next patch, the Infernal Machine event will only be accessible in Torment I and above. Higher levels of Torment will increase the drop rates of both the Keys and the Crafting Materials.

We've also been paying close attention to the Focused Feedback thread, and have several additional changes coming as a result of your extensive testing. This includes:

• Because Torment I is now required to run the event, the fights are now significantly more challenging.
• The Hellfire Ring proc will be undergoing a bit of a mechanical and visual rework. It will be a ground-based damage over time ability. I think I'll leave the new visuals a surprise for now.
• In the Diablo fight, all bosses summoned by Diablo must now also be defeated to successfully complete the fight. This should significantly increase the challenge.

We have a couple of bugs being worked on as well, including adjusting the damage on Maghda's Arcane Sentries and requiring Level 70 Infernal Machines to open the new event.

API Key Update

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker/ Official Forums)

Hey guys!

We’re in the process of revamping our key system in order to alleviate certain problems it causes for our APIs. We’re also working on improvements for APIs and corresponding documentation. The full list of changes will be disclosed at a later time.

In the meantime, we are adjusting the anonymous limit to be the same as the registered key limit on all three community APIs. This means that keys are no longer a requirement. Everyone that doesn’t currently have a key or is in the key queue no longer needs one. All previously issued keys will still work, and you should be able to continue using them without any problems. Should you run into complications with previously issued keys, feel free to send us a message.

We have a lot of features planned for our APIs in the coming year. Keep sending us your feedback, questions and ideas!