DiabloFans

Due to many of our developers becoming flu-ridden zombies and needing to be quarantined so they could recover, we've had to postpone publishing the answers to your questions for the first round of Ask the Devs.

Rather than posting the answers this week (as originally scheduled), we'll now be posting them on Monday, February 11, around 10:00 a.m. PST. We sincerely apologize for the delay, and hope you can forgive us for our recent zombie outbreak.

That's pure hilarity. 3 devs?
Based on the questions the community asked (and voted up in popularity), there were certain developers we needed to reach out to in order to get meaningful answers -- in this case, our system design group.

The Diablo III team is pretty big, but it's made up of multiple working parts, and most of the designers tend to specialize. Certainly, not everyone on the team has been sick, but a tech artist, for example, wouldn't be the correct person to ask about the crafting costs for new Rare recipes. Similarly, a UI engineer isn't going to be able to pontificate on the reasons why we buffed certain Monk skills in 1.0.7, but not others. Unfortunately, it was our system designers that bore the brunt of what we've dubbed the "zombie plague" (they share an office, so it's not a big surprise that they also shared the same nasty flu strain).

We know it sucks that we had to postpone posting the developer answers by a few days. We don't like it, either. But rather than rush the responses or get someone else who isn't responsible for that specific area of design to try to provide answers, we decided to wait until the right people were back in the office. We wanted to make sure that your questions were given that level of attention and respect.

Is the situation ideal? No. Is it the end of the world? Maybe (I've watched enough movies to know this is usually how zombie apocalypses start). But if it is, it's not because the first Ask the Devs round of answers has been delayed until Monday.

Also, I thought that the questions should have been answered days ago. The reason we were told it would take this long was the need to translate it all into different languages and coordinate a release of information. Unless you guys were blowing smoke up our rectums on reddit....
It took us longer to get the responses, but the amount of time we need to get everything localized remains unchanged. That means we had to shift everything down a couple of days to accommodate the developers not being available (we originally wanted to post on Thursday, for example, but now we're going to post on Monday (note: we do observe weekends)).

After reviewing feedback from the PTR, we've decided to rename dueling to brawling—a title we feel is much more fitting for the system. Rather than wait to announce this in the official patch notes, we wanted to let players know ahead of time, in part to reduce confusion and in part to explain the reasons behind the change.

While the system we designed for 1.0.7 was developed in order to give players a fun way to beat each other up in Diablo III, we've come to realize that "dueling" wasn’t the best name for it. Sure, it allows players to pummel, stomp, immolate, and hex fellow Nephalem (over and over again, if they so choose), but it's not a traditional one-on-one duel. It’s something much more wild and open-ended, where you can engage in 3-person and even 4-person free-for-all skirmishes with few restrictions. The system is all about letting players fight for the sake of fighting—you don’t need to worry about objectives, rewards, or scoring, and that’s exactly what we love about it. But again, that’s not really dueling; it’s brawling!

There's a lot of power in a name, and we think that the idea of a brawl more accurately describes the system we created. Heck, the NPC we added is even called Nek the Brawler, so we feel this re-branding must have been foretold in one of Deckard Cain’s prophecies.

This change will be reflected in the patch notes, as well as in all related game text fields once 1.0.7 ships. We’ve no further changes planned for brawling at this time, but we’re excited to see what kind of havoc players will wreak in the Scorched Chapel once the patch is released.

I'm gonna go ahead and call it dueling, if you corporate types don't mind. Stop trying so hard to not be Diablo 2, it's kinda pathetic.
Most of the feedback we've been seeing from players has been in the context of what dueling was in Diablo II and how it exists in other games. Generally speaking, dueling in other games has always been something that you can do in the normal world at a moment’s notice (or at least initiate at a moment’s notice through a challenge). It’s something that only involves two people, and carries with it the expectation of formality and structure, and to a degree…fairness. That’s not really what dueling (now brawling) is about in Diablo III, and we want to make sure that the scope of the system isn't being misrepresented by its name.

Auction House Delays
Hi all, just dropping in to let you know we're still investigating the AH. I know that I was still seeing some delays on my own account. Good news is that we're not seeing any auctions just up and disappear. We'll update the messaging as we are able, for now we have this general messaging up. Thanks for hanging in there!

/Araxom (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)