DiabloFans

The way this is worded, I'm wondering if they mean that if you log into the game during the time period that all of your characters get the buff permanently? If not, it seems like it'd have been easier just to say that during the week you get the buff, rather than talking about having to log in and how it affects all characters in your account. Even if true, it's still oddly worded so I'm not sure.

I've got a huge backlog on Steam. Darn sales! The better ones I've played lately are To the Moon, Poker Night at the Inventory 1 (2 is ok but not as good imho), Syberia, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Also, for anyone with a PS3, I highly recommend Heavy Rain if you (like me) feel that story in video games tends to suck.

Import your character into a calculator such as at d3up.com or d3rawr.com/d and compare some items you find on the AH. The IK helm loses some luster if you already have the 3-set bonus, but getting crit on your helm is still strong both for the damage and for the extra ToC sustainability if it's ever falling off.

It's probably never going to happen, but it would be cool if when you queued for Ubers, you had to have at least 1 machine in your inventory and it would be removed. Then once 4 players have joined, it would use three of the machines and return the extra machine to a random player.

The above obviously doesn't account for undergeared people queuing up though. That's a tougher thing to tackle, but it could conceivably be handled by some sort of rating system where if people consistently rate you down, you're unable to join the automatic queues for some penalty period which would grow successively longer.

At 65k DPS, I'm not sure you'll get much benefit at all out of lifesteal, and with 60k health (your profile says 45.7k?), I don't think you'll get much out of life regen either. Life on Hit, however, should help a lot.

Overall, I agree with Strafir's assessment. Also, I'm not sure Rend is doing you much good as it's really optimized for a high-damage, slow weapon like a 2-hander or at least a mace. Instead, you might look at HotA: Smash / Thunderstrike, or possibly WotB: Insanity or Earthquake to help deal with problem elites.

@TianZi: Sorry to hear that. If it were me, I'd probably try IMing one of the Blizzard CM's and/or emailing wowgmfeedback-us@blizzard.com with a polite explanation of exactly what you did and did not do. It might not go anywhere, but it's at least worth a shot. You could also try calling support I guess and ask for a review. I hope you're able to get it sorted out.

Gearing Barbs can be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. If I'm forced to limit myself to two slots, I probably say to trade the chest for Tyreal's Might (mostly to pick up the movement speed) and drop the Hellfire ring either for something with crit chance, crit damage and min-max damage or for a Stone of Jordan.

I'd go a different route though if I could change out more than that. Ideally, I'd do something like:

• Swap the Mempo for either a crit Mempo or an IK helm. (Probably the IK helm if you swap the belt below, plus it's much cheaper)
• Get a Skorn with both llfesteal (allowing you to drop Bloodthirst + the IK belt) and crit damage if you can afford it. If not, you could keep what you have as well as the belt.
• Trade the IK Belt for Witching Hour if you get a lifesteal Skorn.
• Swap the boots for Natalya's.
• Trade the Hellfire ring for Natalya's, focusing on some combination of crit chance, crit damage, min-max damage, strength, resist all or vit depending on what you can afford and roughly in that order
• Try to craft bracers with crit chance and resist all.

Alternatively, you could go with Zunimassa's boots if you really want to keep the Hellfire ring and the Unity.

You'll be fine. Personally, I'd wait until Tuesday though since that's probably patch day. Once they reinstate 10 million gold per stack on the RMAH, it'll almost certainly be a better deal since you don't get double-taxed that way like you do buying and selling gems.

I can't help feeling that the OP is basically a work of fiction. It's convenient to say that you can't reveal your identity for fear of reprisal, but seriously, what is there to be afraid of? People might make fun of you or say mean things? I don't buy it.

Quote from FEIF81

This is what happends when US and A thinks that EU is a country!!!!!

Once a few states start forming a union, we figure they should make it official and create a federal government. Otherwise, you're just living in sin.

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This is probably something that dev should have asked QA to test. I'm not necessarily saying it's QA's fault, but it is definitely somebody's fault. Don't they have test case reviews where people are supposed to point out things which need to be tested? If so, why wasn't one of them "sell a large amount of gold and then cancel it to make sure the refund works properly"? Somebody clearly dropped the ball here.

The Devs wouldn't have considered that to be a problem. They didn't adjust anything to do with the Method that controls cancelling auctions. That Function should have remained as it was prior to any other changes, all that would change is what number got passed through it.

I'm not saying it wouldn't have been a good thing to test, I'm just saying these things can get missed when you've been staring at the same code and program for a long time. It's the same way that typos and such keep happening in books, news, and the like. There was probably some quick testing to make sure the right amount was taken out and given to the buyer, but the part where you cancel and make sure it goes back to inventory probably got missed. I've seen it happen to even very detailed people, becuase certain things are assumed to work.

I guess my point is that programming errors happen ALL THE TIME and just becuase it's Blizzard people feel the need to elevate it to inane perportions. They're typically quick to fix critical errors even if smaller ones take longer (due to their QA process).

Quote from Zeyk23

As a software developer, here's an inside secret for you guys: QA is really hard.

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+1 and quoted for truth. hehe. My programming never got to pro levels, but I saw first hand many pitfalls that could catch people and had a really good professor that was highly experienced in the trade. I learned a lot from that man.. May he rest in peace.

Quote from overneathe

That's not how you do QC. You test the things that have changed in that patch. The RMAH had no changes. The biggest priority is always things that make the game unplayable or break your account. You can't have an endless list of things that need checking during each patch because small patch iterations go out a few times a day during development, and the "final patch" doesn't stay on the internal severs for more then a day or few, because it's delayed content if it's ready.

With all that said the change could've been accidental and not present on the internal severs at all. Many things happen when launching a game with a super complex engine like Diablo's.

To be clear guys, I have a M.S. in Computer Science and I work at a Fortune 500 company in engineering / internal and external tech support for hardware and software we develop. Part of my job is to attend test case reviews to make sure stuff like this doesn't get missed, so I do have some clue what I'm talking about here. Bugs go live all the time, but when they are as devastating as this one, there are (and should be) inquiries as to how it happened. I'm not calling for firings, but there is obviously a flaw in their testing process. Every aspect of the AH should be tested and retested every time even a minor change is made to it because of the amount of money involved and the catastrophe which will occur if any abusable bugs are discovered. It's not exactly rocket science to figure out that when some part of the mechanism for selling gold for real money changes (and it did in this case), you need to test said mechanism. I assume they at least tested basic functionality, but they clearly did not test it comprehensively enough and should reexamine their process. Are you guys arguing that because testing is hard, they shouldn't try to find out why this happened and learn from it, because that's what I'm hearing.

Quote from KageKaze

While it is a tester's job to break things while they test, usually when a patch itiration such as this comes along, testing is usually confined to things that were changed. In this case the only changes in place were tooltips and the price of gold was adjusted. As a tester I certainly wouldn't have though them adding an extra zero would affect how the posting and revoking of auctions would be affected.

This is probably something that dev should have asked QA to test. I'm not necessarily saying it's QA's fault, but it is definitely somebody's fault. Don't they have test case reviews where people are supposed to point out things which need to be tested? If so, why wasn't one of them "sell a large amount of gold and then cancel it to make sure the refund works properly"? Somebody clearly dropped the ball here.

@Mamba: We don't know. I think Blizzard will find some way to resolve this. I just can't say for sure what it will be yet. It appears that they are trying to avoid rolling back, and it sounds like at least some paypal transactions are being rolled back, but we have no real way to know right now.

I don't understand all the hate toward Kongor in this thread. If you don't like his videos, don't watch them. He's not wrong though. This is a massive failure on Blizzard's part and they obviously need to reevaluate their testing process. QA should have caught this, and there's really no excuse.

But in any case, the AH is now offline. I'm surprised they didn't just take the whole game down because they are obviously going to have to roll stuff back. I'm not sure how they are going to handle the real money transactions though. Presumably, they'll have to refund everyone who bought or sold anything during this time-frame. I assume they have a process in place to do this because the alternative is that they're semi-trained baboons masquerading as software developers.

There's no way to be sure beyond a ton of testing, but I think drop rates should be relatively consistent now based on the hp of the mobs in question. Other acts should be about like A3 was before from what they've said.

Quote from Vulmio

I am surprised you (and the other posters) are discussing how the tomes are useless, when gold is just as useless (excepted as a currency for the AH). We could play the game just fine without the gold (repair is a useless mechanic). Gold is used for crafting only because there is so much gold we have to get rid of it. Without gold in the game we could have the exact same crafting system (maybe balancing the required mats a little) without needing gold at all.

If gold were not required for crafting, then the tomes would make total sense (though the drop rate would probably need to be reduced and some recipes (like gems) tweaked to use less to make them meaningful). It's the combination of both that seems redundant to me. I also agree that the gold sinks in this game feel very by-the-numbers and don't make a lot of sense when you drill into them, hence the massive amounts of gold that get thrown around. Hopefully they'll fix this at some point so that we aren't buying all of our gear for 2 billion gold per item in a year.

Edit: Stupid bug. I think my prediction came clear 1 year too early (I'm mostly kidding, hopefully they can fix this).