Bashiok has promised to bring an end to the eating of posts on Battle.net. Whenever a Battle.net member takes a long time to write a post, the content will disappear when the poster hit “Submit”, which is primarily a frustration to fans that write long posts. This was apparently never supposed to happen, but when the forums were upgraded, we never got the safety feature in the forums that would save the post when asked to log in.

	Blizzard Quote:
	I’m really sorry you lost your post. :( I know it’s been an issue since the forum relaunch at least. These forums do feature the ability to keep posts even if your login session expires. For some reason it broke when the forums were implemented, and it’s recently been raised as a higher priority fix. Until then I highly recommend writing any long posts in a text editor and then copying and pasting them into a post. Sorry again.

Good news!

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Bashiok commented on a couple of minor issues, before making a long post about the benefits of auction houses and how online trading might owrk in Diablo III. Here are the short posts first:

What about DirectX 10 support in Diablo III?

	Blizzard Quote:
	We’re not currently using any specific DirectX 10 features in Diablo III. That could potentially change of course, but if it did we don’t have any plans to then require DirectX 10 to play the game.

Is there too much WoW art and content being reused in Diablo III?

	Blizzard Quote:
	Wow… well you’re obviously very excited. Uhm, well out of all the things you said I guess I could probably talk about the icons. All of the Diablo III UI and icons are created by the Diablo III team, mainly our UI designer Mike Nicholson. We’re not taking any art from other games, it’s all created for Diablo III. It should also be noted that everything seen thus far should be considered placeholder, a lot of the UI has already changed fairly significantly.

Bashiok’s post about auction houses is nearly article length, so click through to read it below the fold.

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The Nielson rating service has been studying which games and gaming systems gamers actually use (as opposed to which they just buy, which is what most top ten charts measure) and their year end results are out, from them some interesting factoids can be gleaned. The PS2 is the most played console and of course WoW is the most played PC game, but what’s that down below it, in 7th place? Yes, Diablo II. Still the seventh most played game of 2008, more than 7 years after the game’s one and only expansion pack. Here’s the top ten most played PC games; check the link for other charts and more analysis.

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Rush posted about the current issue of US PC Gamer with their D3 cover story a few days ago, but I wanted to compare the UK and US editions of the magazine. Both use the official Blizzcon 2008 artwork, but as you can see in the thumbnails, they have different captions. The US cover is on top (larger view here). It says, “Diablo III leads the top games of 09” a caption clearly designed to spur debate over whether or not D3 will be released in this calendar year. There doesn’t seem to be anything new about D3 inside the issue, unfortunately: .“None of the info in the article is new, but they do have an interview with Rob Pardo on the next page discussing other Blizz games.”

Here’s the UK cover, with the same image but a different caption. It says, “Why Blizzard Rule 2009.” The specific focus on D3 isn’t there, despite the articles inside the magazine being much the same. One is posted online, and it gives a general overview of why (in PC Gamer’s fluffing opinion) Blizzard games are so great. Here’s the intro:

In 2002, Blizzard dedicated their entire development staff to producing World of Warcraft. Other projects were put on the back burner as the sheer scale of MMO development was realised. But in 2009, they have a triple threat to unleash. Diablo III: the sequel to the clickiest RPGs in history. Starcraft II: the sequel to the game that became Korea’s national freaking sport. And more WoW - no expansion packs, but more cool updates and ideas.

How do they do it? We caught up with the team fresh from the launch of Lich King, to find out.

It’s not a huge mystery, but it’s an interesting question. Why the difference in the PC Gamer cover story approaches? Controversy sells more in the US? US gamers are more impatient and must be promised (by media, if not Blizzard) that games are coming out much sooner than they actually will? Diablo III is a bigger draw in the US while UK games are more interested in Blizzard on the whole?

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The PC Game section of the Examiner has published a compilation of Diablo 3 features.

• There might be a cow level, or a similar secret-level.
• Diablo III will bring the Diablo story to a close, but it's not necessarily the end of the Diablo universe or series. (No, no one said anything about Diablo IV!)
• Necromancer is out, Witch Doctor is in...but the Necromancer may make some kind of return at a later date.
• You can play every class as either male or female.
• Even though the Art Director (Brian Morrisroe) for Diablo III left, the New Art Style (i.e. colorful) is here to stay. (Brian departed to form a startup company, incidentally.)
• The game takes place in Sanctuary twenty years after the heroes from Diablo II saved the world and went mad for their troubles.
• You'll be able to go back to Tristram.
• Deckard Cain will be back. (Anyone else wondering if Wirt will return as a grown one-legged man?)
• 3 of 5 classes have been revealed: Barbarian, Witch Doctor, and Wizard.
• There will be cooperative and PvP play.
• Quest mechanics and other details are still under wraps.

Brief, and to-the-point. Nothing really new, but you can grab it here if you are interested in this Diablo Drought. If you are interested in more of the Diablo 3 features, check out the Diablo 3 Basics page in DiabloWiki.

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Bashiok has come out of his long silence with a new post addressing concerns about characters’ stat points.  Ever since the BlizzCon 2008 playable demo, it became widespread there wouldn’t be stat points customization anymore in Diablo III. However, Bashiok encouraged fans to dismiss the sentiment for there will be new means to customize your character. Not much was revealed here, but sometimes lack of info says quiet a bunch. This raises more questions than answers, but provides hope for fans who are nerdy about building their character’s power output.

Pyramid16 @ USEast: I think a good way for auto stats is build them up depending on what you do with your character. for example if you spend alot of time on low health, vitality goes up or stamina increase from running alot.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Bashiok: Systems like this are usually a bit too easy to game. That is, once a player figures out how to increase the stat they want through the least amount of effort, they’ll do it. It can also keep you from changing up the way you play easily. We want to allow some amount of freedom in changing up how you play a single character. If I’ve played my Wizard as a long-range glass cannon the entire game, and then get an amazing end-all item drop that makes me want to switch it up and go as more vitality-heavy battle style Wizard, I’d probably have to reroll. Whereas with our current systems it’s just a matter of building up an item base that supports it. In addition to all that, it isn’t a system which is very user friendly. It’s somewhat difficult to explain to the player exactly how those systems work. Not too many people are going to go through the entire game not caring and just playing how they want to play, they want to know exactly how to raise the stats they want, and it would be difficult to display or show how you’re progressing outside of getting a point added. Then you’re wondering “how exactly did that point get there and what do I need to do to get another one?” Not everyone is into strict min-maxing, but almost everyone wants to know how to make a powerful character. I think keeping some systems nebulous and somewhat unexplained to the player is fine, but something such as stat points, a core progression and “power” system, it should be as straight forward as possible. Especially where fast paced action - not toiling over hidden math and requirements - is the game. With auto-stats you lose a small amount of customization, true, but gain a lot of freedoms in adding more - and more interesting - customization through other means. Worm Cans Initialized.

Update: Bashiok replied to several replies further down the thread. To someone who said the different builds possible in D2 provided much of the fun, Bashiok replied:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Agreed, and we’ll probably surpass them for viable number of character builds. With runes it’s actually kind of scary. Seeing the game in the wild and what people will come up with… eek. But it’s exciting, making a character that almost feels too powerful is pretty damn fun.

And when someone else argued that stat points had to be allocated exactly to optimize very powerful character builds, Bashiok said:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Ah, so then stat points were just a means to an end then, weren’t they? In almost all cases anyway. They were a requirement to the items, clicking a button to raise a number to a required value. The items and abilities chosen are really what created the character, not figuring out item requirements. You could argue about it forever if you wanted to. The stat points didn’t make the character, but little extra math problems are fun, but little extra math problems don’t really equate to fun or interesting character building, but I think that math problems are fun and interesting, but ... etc. etc. etc. And of course all I can attempt to do is assure you that there’s going to be plenty of build potential, plenty of customization, and plenty of math to dive into, if that’s your thing.

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We hope everyone has had a nice New Years Eve and you are feeling somewhat comfortable with writing "2009" or "09" in dates, even if that means you are actually back at work... We sure haven't had any lack of activity in the Diablo community over the holidays regardless of IRL social interaction, so we can expect even more when Diablo 3 is finally released!

Just as over Christmas, there has been a lot of new and hot threads in the forums. Here are a few random highlights out of your submitted (and our favourite) threads, but don't forget to send a mail to if you find a particularly interesting thread in need of highlighting! Thanks for the New Year week contributions, and keep them coming!


One of the Unannounced Classes? (Dervish)

• The Dervish was mentioned by Jay Wilson some months ago and geshi, a first time poster, picked up the topic again with a few interesting observations.

Diablo 3 Patches and Events Frequently?

• raveharu asks if we might like seasonal content in Diablo, similar to WoW. What would you like?

Diablo III Release Date Question

• The Diablo 3 release date is naturally something we all think about (and have a huge thread for). New member snipermcguns have a nice laid back idea on how to find out when the game will ship....

About de Globes

• The Health Globes and the Mana Globes of Diablo 3 are almost the source of a small controversy. raveharu dislikes their current iteration, what do you think?

Your future Barbarian's Name Will Be...

• Echod16's popular thread continues...

One-liner Wishes: What Do You Want In D3 The Most?

• Simple concept. What do you want the most? You only get a one-liner to explain it! Thread idea by mkbush.

Is Anybody Else Scared of Release?

• Perhaps an odd question, but [cK]Extreme is worried if D3 will be niche enough for his taste. The question is if people want niche or mainstream...

Thanks again for the past week's submissions, and remember to use the Diii.net Diablo 3 forums to dull your work pains!

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The February issue of PCGamer is sporting a Blizzard special front cover with “Diablo III Leads Top Games of 2009” as the headline.

We have already talked a bit about Dianlo 3 being released this year and I think most of us are of the opinion that the game will not see the light of day in 2009, regardless of what the mags say. According to site visitor Booner, there is no new info in the mag but it does have an interview with Rob Pardo who talks about all Blizzard games.

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A new piece of concept art of the female Witch Doctor recently popped up on the Sons of the Storm site, which is run by a number of Blizzard artists. This one was drawn by Glenn Rane, and while we saw a piece of this it in the WWI art trailer, this full image is more revealing (literally and figuratively) and higher quality. Enjoy.

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The 2008/2009 lists continue with the C&VG 9 Must-have games of 2009. The list includes both console and PC titles, and while StarCraft 2 made the list of nine, Diablo 3 didn’t, but rather the “plenty to get excited about” honourable mentions list.

Now if I am not mistaken, Diablo 3 will probably be the biggest PC release of 2009 (even though it is unlikely the game will be released this year). While popular, StarCraft 2 will not create as much long-lasting interest as Diablo 3 in my opinion.

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