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Blood Thief Exploit Clarifications

Nevalistis made a post explaining how the Blood Shard exploit worked and revealing some of the measures taken against players found abusing it. Clarifications meant to show some transparency towards the playerbase regarding the actions we recently heard about and reported. Read below for details.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

UPDATE – April 21 @ 6:05 p.m. PDT
While this issue is now resolved, we know a lot of players have questions about what happened and how we responded, so we wanted to take some time to discuss a few of the details with you here.

Following the launch of patch 2.2.0, players discovered an exploit that caused Blood Thief goblins to drop a larger number of Blood Shards than intended. The exploit could only occur in Greater Rifts when in a multiplayer group and required a specific sequence of steps to activate.

As soon as we were able to able to verify the exploit and identify its underlying cause, we immediately began working on a hotfix for PC. The hotfix was deployed in all gameplay regions on April 16, which made the following changes to the game:

• In order be eligible for experience or loot from any monster (including Treasure Goblins), you must do damage to it or be in the same area when it is killed
• If you are in a Greater Rift, you are no longer eligible for any experience or loot gained by party members outside of the rift

For console, this particular change cannot be implemented via hotfix, so we've temporarily disabled all Blood Thief goblin spawns on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One until further notice (pending a future patch).
From there, taking the complexity and impact of the exploit into consideration, we also elected to action accounts on a case-by-case basis. In general, one of three things occurred:

• Accounts which were found to have both used the exploit excessively and publicly promoted its use were permanently banned.
• Accounts which were found to have used the exploit excessively, but did not publicly promote it, were rolled back and their associated heroes removed from active Leaderboards (both Seasonal and non-Seasonal).
• Accounts which were found to have used the exploit to a limited degree (or quickly stopped once realizing the scope of what was happening) were effectively pardoned. We understand these situations can inspire a certain level of curiosity and that it may not always be immediately clear if you’re undermining intended game mechanics. Mistakes happen, but we hope this leniency won’t be taken for granted in the future.

All in all, this incident has shown us that the vast majority of players, upon encountering an in-game exploit, will not only put sportsmanship and fair play above personal gain, but will also work to bring the matter to our attention quickly via channels like hacks@blizzard.com, our online webform and ticket system, and these very forums. (We even received a few Twitter DMs, Skype messages, and personal emails too!) So, on behalf of the development team, I just want to say thank you to those of you who took the time to notify us, as well as apologize for any inconvenience caused a result.

As noted in our original post, maintaining an enjoyable and equitable play experience is very important to us, and we’re going to continue to monitor the game as well as take steps to prevent exploits like this from happening again.

Wudijo's Guide on UE and M6

Wudijo posted another incredibly detailed guide with everything a Demon Hunter needs to know about optimizing their Unhallowed Essence and Embodiment of the Marauder sets. Below there's a preview of the full thread. Check it out for the full guide, with a link to the spreadsheet he uses and a video where he explains how that is meant to be used. Check it out, Demon Hunters!

[Introduction]

So you might remember my post back in the beginning of 2.1.2 where I outlined why the physical element is superior to cold for the M6 CA build, and which also helped to spark the whole Taeguk + Hexing Pants meta. Back then I used a spreadsheet that I had created to math out the differences between each build and compare different item and skill choices. Now, I have updated it for 2.2.0 and polished it, so that it is in a state that can give approximate results for almost any situations and rift layout, including runtime, buffs, cooldowns, number of enemies, number of elite packs, area damage procs etc., and I also decided to release it for public use this time.

I have also uploaded a video on my Youtube channel where I go over the how the spreadsheet works and how I concluded my results here if you want to check that out. Obviously it's a little bit difficult to model everything in a spreadsheet like this, and not all of the numbers are exactly accurate. Other than that, just reading this post should be more or less enough to give you an understanding of relative strength of the builds and item preferences.

When it comes to the actual damage values in the spreadsheet, I have tried to model fights versus different amounts of monsters and the fact that you will not hit everything all the time. This was done by assigning a share of your total time spent in the rift to each monster group size and then calculating approximate values for total damage done per skill use for every increment. I feel that the numbers I used are a little bit too generous towards large groups for your average rift but should be more or less adequate for very dense dream rifts (remember we're talking about "optimization" here). Also, I divided the sheet dps by 1 million to make the numbers more readable. No matter if my "rift calculation" is correct or not, you will still have the exact same stat weighs (other than area damage obviously) because those are not influenced by it.

Blizzcon Benefit Dinner Tickets

As a reminder the tickets for the pre-Blizzcon Benefit Diner will be sold tomorrow, at 7 p.m PST, for 750 US$. If you're interested in the exclusive experience, keep an eye out for it.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Before BlizzCon 2015 gets underway, we're inviting you to kick back and kick things off with game developers, artists, and other folks from Blizzard Entertainment—all for a good cause. Approximately 200 tickets to a special pre-BlizzCon dinner to benefit Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC)  will be going on sale Wednesday, April 22 at 7 p.m. PDT at www.blizzcon2015.eventbrite.com.

Click here to buy tickets Wednesday at 7 p.m.!

For more information, visit the BlizzCon Benefit Dinner info page on the official BlizzCon website.