Another Botched Blizzard Launch
Blizzard has completely botched yet another game launch. I hear things didn't too smooth in Europe; and not sure about Asia. The US launch is a disaster with massive reports of players still not being able to log in over an hour after launch. And all kinds of other problems too. On top of that, the Login screen as no queueing mechanism so you have to keep trying to log in over and over again... ading yet more load to the already impoverished Blizzard servers.
And you want a status update on what the hell is going? Don't bother going to Blizzard's web site; that is down too for "maintenance". Somehow I doubt they scheduled a maintainance window the night of launch. A more accurate represenation would say "down because we didn't get our shit together".
When you are the largest gaming company in the world, this kind of launch is utter fail and due to complete mismanagement. If this happened in any other industry, I am pretty sure that several heads would roll as a result.
Update: Today (Wednesday) more of the same. I think we are on our third emergency maintenance window. One thing after another. Servers back up in a couple of hours... Maybe.
Launch Day (v 1.0.1.9558)
Launch day is finally just around the corner. You can now install the game client in preparation for the midnight PDT launch.
The StringList Data Changes are now up. When there is a patch, these changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!
Beta Archive
I have moved most of the Beta related articles from the front page to the front page to the Beta Archive
D3Lexicon
After a long hiatus, D3Lexicon is back and updated! This has been my favorite D3 game info site for a long time so be sure to check it out. In fact, I liked this site so much that it completely removed any desire I had to try and do something similar. And that's a great thing because I am very busy with trying to take over the world with the Auction House.
Auction House Search Preview
I've finally completed the first pass of my Auction House item viewer. Currently, the item data is old (from Patch 8692) and is not being refreshed. There's still a long ways to go, but to get an early sneak peak, click on the Auctions link at the top.
Bypassing Game Client Patching (for Mooege)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about Patching the Diablo 3 Game Client. This new article describes how tp bypass game client patching so that you can use Mooege without an Internet connection (useful for folks like myself that travel a lot). Click here to read more...
On Duping...
Let me start of by saying that if duping exists in Diablo 3, it will kill the game. I don't think that's an exaggeration. You may think to yourself that it won't be so bad because Diablo 2 is still popular and duping there has been going on forever, and in large amounts. While that may be true, duping in D3 will bring Blizzard to its knees. Click here to read more...
Patching the Diablo 3 Game Client
Every Beta Patch, I noticed that some websites were able to obtain the Patch MPQs before my Beta game client was able to download them. Some folks on various forums posted as much, and Bashiok even commented on this on Twitter:
@crypto2000 @Angryrobotics Nah, they just know where to look. The patch is technically public, just not enabled in the game launcher.
@crypto2000 @angryrobotics Our patch clients are always available before the patch is officially released, if you know where to look.
I found those tweets quite annoying because rather than informing the public exactly where the publicly available patches were, Bashiok confirmed that they did exist, and implied that you were just not cool enough to be in the club with those in-the-know.
A friend from the great d3db.com website gave me the links to the Patch MPQ downloads which I really appreciated. But what I really wanted was to understand more about the patching process so that I would not have to rely on others should the process change down the road. Read on to learn more...
Mission Statement
The purpose of this site is to provide the Diablo 3 community with a place to discuss and analyze items. While this sounds pretty mundane, Diablo is at its core an item hunting game.
The central feature of this site, and the one that differentiates it from the myriad of other Diablo sites, is the ability to create "Item Profiles" and to evaluate items against these profiles. An Item Profile is a template that allows you to evaluate an item based on how well the attributes of the item match those defined in your profile. For example, you could create a profile for a "dual leech" ring; this profile would require that the item be a ring, and that it has both "life steal" and "mana steal". Furthermore, you can assign values to other useful mods (e.g., prismatic and +Life). This will allow you to assign a "rating" to a given item. That rating represents how good the item is based on the profile that you have defined.
I also plan to allow users to submit their Item Profiles to the community. This would be done using a forums-based review process. Once an "Item Profile" is accepted, it would become public for everyone to use. The purpose of this feature is to create Item Profiles that actually reflect the wants and needs of the community.
When you want to evaluate an item, you will have the ability to rate the item based on all your profiles (and/or public profiles) at once. This way, you can see whether an item might be suitable for niche purposes.
Eventually, I hope that Auction House data will become publicly available (as it now is for WoW via the Blizzard Community Platform API). When this happens, I plan to add Auction House features to the site. This will not only let you see current auctions, but also get historical information about past auctions. Most importantly, it will allow you to scan the Auction House using your custom Item Profiles. This will help you find the items that you are looking for. Ultimately, the Auction House scanner could be enhanced to support email notifications such that you would be notified immediately once an item you are looking for has been found. There are a lot of possibilities with this feature, but it all depends on the Auction House data being public or data-minable (e.g., screen scraping using OCR technology).
MPQ Reverse-Engineering
Another feature I am working on is a reverse-engineering of some of the crucial game files. Since this is quite a daunting task, I started off with something very simple: StringList files (click on the link for more information). I am hard at work on reverse engineering the AffixList.gam and Items_*.gam "GameBalance" file formats.
In the not-so-distant future, I hope to publish item data, affix data, spell data (with per level details), and treasure class data (monster loot drop information).
The MPQs menu link above provides an introduction to the Diablo 3 MPQ files. It will also contain links to the game file details as I make them available.
The details of the ItemTypes.gam File were previously posted. This was a prelude to the more juicy Affix and Item information which is now available.
StringList Files
The StringList files are used by Diablo 3 to convert Non-NLS keys into language specific strings. A number of these files are now available for viewing. For each file, differences between (beta patch) versions can also shown allowing you to track patch changes as they happen.
What this site is not
This site is not a replacement for general community sites such as Diablo incgamers or Diablo Fans, nor is it intended to act as a wiki for the Diablo 3 universe.
When will it all be ready?
Features will be added as they become available. I have a very long list of features that I plan to add over the coming months, and will also be soliciting feedback from the community via the Forums. Speaking of Forums, I have recently enabled them (email verification required). That's the good news! The bad news is that it will take some time to build up a steady community, and forums are only as useful as the posts contributed.
I expect this site to be fully ready before the launch of Diablo 3, towards the end of this year. I will continue to evolve this site based on feedback from the community.
