Due to popular demand we have made a small change to the trading forums. They are now split by region for easier use.
Commodity Sales Back for all Regions
As was reported yesterday, commodity sales were working again in US regions when the servers came online. It looks like all regions now have working commodity sales as well.
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Update: Commodity trading has been activated again in the Diablo III Auction House. Happy auctioneering 
Disparity Between Melee and Ranged
There were some good questions that were answered in yesterdays AMAA. However some questions the devs just did not have enough time to answer. Today Lylirra posted a reply from Wyatt Cheng about the disparity between melee and ranged.
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
I'll state up front that I do think there's a disparity between melee and ranged, and I would like to see that closed. I feel like if I talk a lot about thought processes and design philosophy and don't state this up front people will lose the forest for the trees and conclude we think everything is fine. So I'll say it again: melee vs. ranged disparity is not fine, changes are being made, and even if you disagree with the approach outlined below we can hopefully have the common ground that the current situation needs improvement.
It may not look like it on the surface, but a large number of the changes in 1.0.3 are actually targeted at closing the melee/ranged gap. Let me go through some of them.
Hardcore
I'm going to use Hardcore as a starting point. In Hardcore, there's actually a reasonable distribution of classes, and I don't think the melee vs. ranged disparity is as large. There are a lot of Hardcore players of every class in Inferno without a huge disparity. Why is this important? It's because a significant portion of the melee/ranged disparity is related to a ranged character's ability to progress even while dying. A melee player can throw themselves at a monster and die, doing almost no damage to an elite enemy. A ranged player can do a huge amount of damage to an elite enemy, die, respawn, and basically attrition the enemy down with repeated deaths. In the Hardcore environment where a single bad Mortar, Vortex, Jailer, or Reflects Damage will kill a glass cannon-ranged character, the disparity between ranged and melee is an order of magnitude less.
Repair Costs
One of the more controversial changes in 1.0.3 is the increased repair costs. The design intent of these increased repair costs is to make death more meaningful. One of the top arguments we see against the increased repair costs is "I'm already dying dozens of times to make any progress in Inferno. Don't you see this is going to make this impossible?" This concern is most often brought up by ranged glass cannons. Many melee players respond "increased repair costs seem fine" because they haven't been using death-zerging as a tactic. Melee can't easily death-zerg an enemy down, but ranged can. I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.
Enemy Health and Damage
We're also looking to adjust the damage and health of enemies in Inferno Acts II, III, and IV. This is another change that is primarily for melee with secondary benefits for ranged. A lot of ranged are building glass cannon with the mentality "well, I'll just try not to get hit at all." So, reducing incoming damage when they weren't taking any before isn't significant for them, whereas reducing incoming damage for the melee is a big deal. For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes. While before the damage was so large it just felt pointless to try and mitigate any of it at all, after the change hopefully ranged classes will think "well, if I just put on a modest amount of survivability, I don't get 1-shot, so that's worth it." There are some ranged players who are already doing this -- stacking survivability so they don’t have to endlessly kite -- and it just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.
Damage Reduction in Co-op
Another change which is targeted at improving life for melee is the reduction in co-op damage. Again, since many ranged players just build glass cannon and avoid damage completely, they didn't really care if incoming damage went up as other players entered the game, but the melee characters really noticed. It was very easy for your life-on-hit to have you at a steady equilibrium, but as soon as another player entered the game your life-on-hit was no longer covering the incoming damage and death became imminent.
Additional Changes
And finally, there are always minor polish adjustments designed to help melee -- such as the AI on some monsters (BEES!!!) being tweaked to run away less often, which again helps melee more than ranged. I actually spent some extra time the other day to make sure if a Sand Wasp runs away from you, and you start chasing the wasp, it doesn't turn and shoot 4 bees in your face (hopefully that makes 1.0.3). I'm also working with one of our gameplay engineers to make it so if you sidestep the Dark Berserker’s power hit (where he brings his giant mace down), he doesn’t turn to track you as he swings (though that change probably won't make 1.0.3). These kind of AI adjustments are things ranged players don’t even notice, but are huge for melee.
Another adjustment being made is increasing both the maximum range and the dead zone of Mortar. Mortar was specifically designed to be an anti-range affix, but many ranged players would just stand even farther away, whereas melee would sometimes get caught in the cross-fire of two Mortars. Increasing the maximum range and the dead zone helps with both of these.
It may not look like it on the surface, but a large number of the changes in 1.0.3 are actually targeted at closing the melee/ranged gap. Let me go through some of them.
Hardcore
I'm going to use Hardcore as a starting point. In Hardcore, there's actually a reasonable distribution of classes, and I don't think the melee vs. ranged disparity is as large. There are a lot of Hardcore players of every class in Inferno without a huge disparity. Why is this important? It's because a significant portion of the melee/ranged disparity is related to a ranged character's ability to progress even while dying. A melee player can throw themselves at a monster and die, doing almost no damage to an elite enemy. A ranged player can do a huge amount of damage to an elite enemy, die, respawn, and basically attrition the enemy down with repeated deaths. In the Hardcore environment where a single bad Mortar, Vortex, Jailer, or Reflects Damage will kill a glass cannon-ranged character, the disparity between ranged and melee is an order of magnitude less.
Repair Costs
One of the more controversial changes in 1.0.3 is the increased repair costs. The design intent of these increased repair costs is to make death more meaningful. One of the top arguments we see against the increased repair costs is "I'm already dying dozens of times to make any progress in Inferno. Don't you see this is going to make this impossible?" This concern is most often brought up by ranged glass cannons. Many melee players respond "increased repair costs seem fine" because they haven't been using death-zerging as a tactic. Melee can't easily death-zerg an enemy down, but ranged can. I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.
Enemy Health and Damage
We're also looking to adjust the damage and health of enemies in Inferno Acts II, III, and IV. This is another change that is primarily for melee with secondary benefits for ranged. A lot of ranged are building glass cannon with the mentality "well, I'll just try not to get hit at all." So, reducing incoming damage when they weren't taking any before isn't significant for them, whereas reducing incoming damage for the melee is a big deal. For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes. While before the damage was so large it just felt pointless to try and mitigate any of it at all, after the change hopefully ranged classes will think "well, if I just put on a modest amount of survivability, I don't get 1-shot, so that's worth it." There are some ranged players who are already doing this -- stacking survivability so they don’t have to endlessly kite -- and it just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.
Damage Reduction in Co-op
Another change which is targeted at improving life for melee is the reduction in co-op damage. Again, since many ranged players just build glass cannon and avoid damage completely, they didn't really care if incoming damage went up as other players entered the game, but the melee characters really noticed. It was very easy for your life-on-hit to have you at a steady equilibrium, but as soon as another player entered the game your life-on-hit was no longer covering the incoming damage and death became imminent.
Additional Changes
And finally, there are always minor polish adjustments designed to help melee -- such as the AI on some monsters (BEES!!!) being tweaked to run away less often, which again helps melee more than ranged. I actually spent some extra time the other day to make sure if a Sand Wasp runs away from you, and you start chasing the wasp, it doesn't turn and shoot 4 bees in your face (hopefully that makes 1.0.3). I'm also working with one of our gameplay engineers to make it so if you sidestep the Dark Berserker’s power hit (where he brings his giant mace down), he doesn’t turn to track you as he swings (though that change probably won't make 1.0.3). These kind of AI adjustments are things ranged players don’t even notice, but are huge for melee.
Another adjustment being made is increasing both the maximum range and the dead zone of Mortar. Mortar was specifically designed to be an anti-range affix, but many ranged players would just stand even farther away, whereas melee would sometimes get caught in the cross-fire of two Mortars. Increasing the maximum range and the dead zone helps with both of these.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Why are you allowing the RMAH to deteriorate nearly every other aspect of the game? I already know the answer but I want them to endure the discomfort of saying it.
It's a question based around a false pretense. We've repeatedly explained the game design philosophy for our systems many times in the past, easily proving your brash claim to be false.
There's no answer for a question like that.
There is only information, listening and constructive feedback. We'll continue to play our part.
Auction House
Error 31073 indicates the auction house is currently experiencing a lot of traffic, and (to help mitigate that) it is automatically throttling the number of items that can be listed at a given time.
The post below goes into a little more detail: http://us.battle.net...ic/5573699157#2
Same for me! Just bout an item. I got an error message. Lost my cash, cant get my item, and cant see any of my gear in sale screen, nor the gears that I did not sale.
What error did you receive, do you remember?
Just an FYI, depending on current traffic in the auction house, you may experience a delay in having items appear in your Completed tab (or, similarly, having gold transferred from the Completed Tab to your stash). More here:http://us.battle.net...ic/5573699157#1
Fail...
Why not just sort out your DB problems, and lease more hardware, FFS this AH is going to make them millions, throw 10% of that revenue stream at making it work better.
Pass that on PLZ
We're continuing to make a number of improvements to the auction house, but this is an interim solution to improve overall stability. It's not ideal and our goal is to have it so that players don't experience that error at all.
Idk my error message just says, "THE AUCTION HOUSE IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE". Pretty easy for me to understand that.
Is the auction house button grayed out, as well?
So it is working, I just can see why people would jump to conclusions that their stuff is gone and what not, they just need to be a little patient...
That's definitely good advice, but I know it can be hard to heed.
If players are experiencing the grayed-out auction house button, they should ideally wait a few minutes and then try again later. Alternatively, they can enter a game and come back out, or logout and then login again to try again. This is actually another way of limiting traffic on the auction house during peak gaming hours. We don't have a timeframe yet for when we plan to remove this specific type of throttling, but we will be working not only to improve the messaging around it but also to implement fixes and general optimizations that will make it unnecessary to throttle players to begin with.
It's 2012 and you are still exposing cryptic error numbers to users instead of actual helpful messages.
Error 31073 should be accompanied by the following message: "Due to heavy system load your transaction request has not yet been resolved. Please keep this in mind as you consider additional transactions in the auction house. Check the completed auctions tab for more information." Yes/no? If not, that messaging should be going in with a future patch.
Any news on those people with blacked out auction house?
You just quoted the answer to that very question.
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Dyeing Legendaries
I have the same issue. Why hasn't this been hotfixed???
It's unfortunately not that easy.
Andrew Chambers (senior game designer for Diablo III) addressed this question yesterday here:
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Aus/NZ Service
Thank you for everyone's feedback we have had on this topic.
As part of improving our service we’ve made further optimisations to our server-selection process for ANZ players connecting to the Americas region that will provide more consistent latency when connecting. Our systems are currently operating to specification; however, we will continue to monitor things in the event that further issues arise on our end.
We recognise that some players are continuing to have latency-related problems possibly due to issues outside of our infrastructure. For players impacted by ongoing latency issues, we are continuing to investigate the potential causes with the help of your feedback here in the Aus/NZ forums. Please note that you should judge the quality of your connection by your actual in-game experience, NOT by the small latency meter in the in-game user interface, which is not always an accurate reflection of your actual connectivity.
We invite players to test out the new optimisations and welcome additional forum feedback on user experience. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Report Spam
This post brings up a great point. If you find gold spammers in the General Chat please use the in-game option to report them.
If you are unsure how to do this, just right click on the player name in the chat and select Report then Spam.
This will help to reduce the gold seller spam for everyone. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Diabloholics
This game is only for "Diabloholics" you whiners should QUIT the game as you said it. If we can play the game, can you not?
But that's not true at all. While Diablo III may not be for everyone, our goal is to make the game as fun as it possibly can be -- for long-time fans of franchise, for players just getting started, and for all those people somewhere in the middle -- and criticism lets us know how we can improve.
No one should be advised to "quit" the game simply because they don't play the same way you do. Constructive discussion, good. Vitriol, bad. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
It's a question based around a false pretense. We've repeatedly explained the game design philosophy for our systems many times in the past, easily proving your brash claim to be false.
There's no answer for a question like that.
There is only information, listening and constructive feedback. We'll continue to play our part.
Auction House
Error 31073 indicates the auction house is currently experiencing a lot of traffic, and (to help mitigate that) it is automatically throttling the number of items that can be listed at a given time.
The post below goes into a little more detail: http://us.battle.net...ic/5573699157#2
Same for me! Just bout an item. I got an error message. Lost my cash, cant get my item, and cant see any of my gear in sale screen, nor the gears that I did not sale.
What error did you receive, do you remember?
Just an FYI, depending on current traffic in the auction house, you may experience a delay in having items appear in your Completed tab (or, similarly, having gold transferred from the Completed Tab to your stash). More here:http://us.battle.net...ic/5573699157#1
Fail...
Why not just sort out your DB problems, and lease more hardware, FFS this AH is going to make them millions, throw 10% of that revenue stream at making it work better.
Pass that on PLZ
We're continuing to make a number of improvements to the auction house, but this is an interim solution to improve overall stability. It's not ideal and our goal is to have it so that players don't experience that error at all.
Idk my error message just says, "THE AUCTION HOUSE IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE". Pretty easy for me to understand that.
Is the auction house button grayed out, as well?
So it is working, I just can see why people would jump to conclusions that their stuff is gone and what not, they just need to be a little patient...
That's definitely good advice, but I know it can be hard to heed.
If players are experiencing the grayed-out auction house button, they should ideally wait a few minutes and then try again later. Alternatively, they can enter a game and come back out, or logout and then login again to try again. This is actually another way of limiting traffic on the auction house during peak gaming hours. We don't have a timeframe yet for when we plan to remove this specific type of throttling, but we will be working not only to improve the messaging around it but also to implement fixes and general optimizations that will make it unnecessary to throttle players to begin with.
It's 2012 and you are still exposing cryptic error numbers to users instead of actual helpful messages.
Error 31073 should be accompanied by the following message: "Due to heavy system load your transaction request has not yet been resolved. Please keep this in mind as you consider additional transactions in the auction house. Check the completed auctions tab for more information." Yes/no? If not, that messaging should be going in with a future patch.
Any news on those people with blacked out auction house?
You just quoted the answer to that very question.
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Dyeing Legendaries
I have the same issue. Why hasn't this been hotfixed???
It's unfortunately not that easy.
Andrew Chambers (senior game designer for Diablo III) addressed this question yesterday here:
I just chatted with our awesome artists about this the other day! We currently have some tech restrictions that make it unfeasible for us to [allow players to dye legendaries]. We definitely want to allow this though, and we are looking at solving the tech issues related to it.
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Aus/NZ Service
Thank you for everyone's feedback we have had on this topic.
As part of improving our service we’ve made further optimisations to our server-selection process for ANZ players connecting to the Americas region that will provide more consistent latency when connecting. Our systems are currently operating to specification; however, we will continue to monitor things in the event that further issues arise on our end.
We recognise that some players are continuing to have latency-related problems possibly due to issues outside of our infrastructure. For players impacted by ongoing latency issues, we are continuing to investigate the potential causes with the help of your feedback here in the Aus/NZ forums. Please note that you should judge the quality of your connection by your actual in-game experience, NOT by the small latency meter in the in-game user interface, which is not always an accurate reflection of your actual connectivity.
We invite players to test out the new optimisations and welcome additional forum feedback on user experience. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Report Spam
This post brings up a great point. If you find gold spammers in the General Chat please use the in-game option to report them.
If you are unsure how to do this, just right click on the player name in the chat and select Report then Spam.
This will help to reduce the gold seller spam for everyone. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Diabloholics
This game is only for "Diabloholics" you whiners should QUIT the game as you said it. If we can play the game, can you not?
But that's not true at all. While Diablo III may not be for everyone, our goal is to make the game as fun as it possibly can be -- for long-time fans of franchise, for players just getting started, and for all those people somewhere in the middle -- and criticism lets us know how we can improve.
No one should be advised to "quit" the game simply because they don't play the same way you do. Constructive discussion, good. Vitriol, bad. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Wiki Class Progression Pages
Though this feature has been on the official game guide, some users did not find the layout user friendly. The wiki has been updated to hold a table for all five classes showing what skills unlock at each level.
Diablo III - Race to the Finish: Creative Machinima
Submit a creative machinima video using Diablo 3. There is no limit to what you can do, be as creative as you like! You may also enter as many times as you like, as long as each entry is unique. Post your video in the "Creative Machinima" contest thread.
All videos must be submitted before June 15th, 2012. Some rules do apply, make sure to read the official rules before submitting and working on your video! Also, any post processing tools, such as Vegas, adobe premier, ect.., are allowed. However any programs that alters the behavior of the game itself are forbidden.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012It's not that there making it harder, there fixing a bug that made it to easy.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Yep i have actually stopped playing for the same reasons, i faceroll Act 1 Inferno so im not saying its to hard.
I would just like to move on from Act 1, seeing ranged friends with less gear and skill complete more just cause there range is very annoying.
Im also not saying make it all faceroll, its Inferno it should be hard as nails, but i doubt there original game design was built around Range being superior to melee..
With melee needing 5X the defensive gear then the range making it virtually impossible to farm the gear legitimately.
I understand that the game is all about farming but its become (For me) farm gold > go to auction house > hope there's a upgrade. (Normally there isn't) > Quit.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012They aren't making it harder. Mortar should do less damage in 1.0.3, but there were a lot of ranged who were just outranging the mortar entirely (shooting 'off screen', as it were) while melee were still getting caught in the Mortar. Since Mortar is meant to be bad for ranged, good for melee... It needs to be changed.
Essentially for ranged, your new tactic won't be to outrange it, but to stay at just the right range where you don't get hit by mortar, but don't get hit by melee attacks either. Tricky, certainly: doable, totally!
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Keep up the good job and thanks again for you impressive daily coverage !
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Posted Jun 8, 2012I'm a little nervous being ranged if Blizzard thinks we really have it that much better off than melee. We've already seen how bull-headed this dev team is and they overdo everything. "Oh you guys want hard? We'll just make everything one shot you and not test it! That'll be hard!!! We'll show you!". This repair cost thing is along the same lines.
I hope the damage nerf makes it so that ranged can actually survive 4-5 hits or this new patch is going to be horrible for ranged. If terror demons still come out of invis and one shot me... I'll flip some tables, lol.
Is there an ETA for 1.0.3 yet?
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Sure the game is tougher for undergeared melee than it is undergeared range. However when both melee and ranged classes have good gear, survivability swings highly in melee's favor.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Sounds like to me you are what you are calling those barbs and monks except you are ranged.
As melee if you have good gear then you can roll through most acts(or so I've read.) I haven't been to act 2 yet just farmed the end of hell for a few great upgrades and now I'm facerolling through act 1.
As ranged you shouldn't ever get hit. Just stack damage and boom watch them drop. If you want more survivability then welcome to melees world where you have to stack survive stats along with damage.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012-
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Sounds like to me you don't play ranged
Never getting hit sounds like all fun and games until you actually try to never get hit. Have fun with phasebeasts with firechains/vortex or something like that and let me know how it goes. Any mob with teleport will hit you sooner or later unless you cheese it and kite across 10 maps at max screen range and even then. Some projectiles are very difficult to dodge with lag and all the shit that can happen on screen at once. And watching mobs drop is fun with regular trash mobs but I've met some elites with 2-3M HP, those don't just"drop" even with 40-50k DPS... (And please don't mention ppl like Athene who bought who knows how many millions worth of gear from donations, and can drop a 3M hp mob in 3 sec, we all know that doesn't count as it doesn't represent like 99.9% of ppl in Inferno right now).
I think the correct thing to say is that as ranged you should not get hit MUCH. The problem is that right now past act 1, getting hit 2 times is too much most of the time. You get to a point where you have to dodge almost everything perfectly and a lot of stupid stuff means instant death.
I think people got the idea that ranged is easier because they progressed further/faster in Inferno by rez zerging the harder stuff or just bypassing it with teleport/SS or w/e. As ranged you can rez zerg a difficult pack and kill them eventually. Kiting also allows to clear areas even if you are severely undergeared for the zone. As melee if you cannot take the hits you can't kill those same packs. Does this make ranged easier? Not really, it's just bad mechanics from the game that are exploitable by ranged more than melee, Some AIs are plain retarded when you hit them from max range, they stand in place and don't even move. Rez zerging is easily fixed, a mob should heal instantly if you die or maybe after 1 death.
I agree than melee need to farm a lot more gear to start progressing Inferno while range can start pushing with much crappier gear. The drawback is that you will most likely die a crapton of times doing that and come next patch that will be really costly.
We'll see how it feels once they tweak the damage in Inferno. I'll gladly go farm some resist if it means I can take a few more hits. Right now it feels useless on ranged and trying a pack untill you manage to dodge almost everything perfectly is very boring/frustrating at times. Not mentionning some retarded combos that require a new game without even trying (like invulnerable/vortex/teleport/fast or some crap like that).
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Posted Jun 8, 2012Agreed. Ranged has the upper hand right now when it comes to the progress you can do while undergeared, but it sure as hell ain't easy. I feel insulted when people say I'm rez zerging my way through inferno. I didn't clear inferno because I rez zerged, I cleared inferno because I learned to dodge crap like a boss. I really hope melee gets it a bit easier in this patch, mostly because I'm tired of carrying my barb buddy through act3/4, but I hope ranged gets some cake too. If I could survive 2 hits (or maybe even 3!) I probably wouldn't die anymore if you consider how leet I am at dodging projectiles now.
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Posted Jun 8, 2012