Blizzard rolled out a number of new hotfixes yesterday for the wildly popular Diablo III.
The patches addressed specific issues, including server crashes and a bug that allowed players to “earn additional stacks of Nephalem Valor or guaranteed item drops by killing multiple monsters simultaneously from the same Champion or Rare pack.”
In addition to rolling out Hotfixes, Blizzard also discussed the practice of Magic Find Gear Swapping, which allows players to exchange their gear, boosting chances of finding magic items before a kill.
While Blizzard currently doesn’t have a problem with the practice, the company did confirm it planned to address the issue due to player concerns. This may or may not be good news for you – depending on your stance. Of course, it’s certainly nice to hear that Blizzard is willing to make changes based on player feedback and requests.
There’re also some new details that have surfaced about endgame solutions with a Blizzard community manager known as “Bashiok” acknowledging the company had misjudged the appeal of item hunting as the end game for Diablo III – something which is likely to change with the advent of future patches.
“We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually they’re going to run out of stuff to do (if they haven’t already). Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks,” Bashiok explained in an official post.
“But honestly Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren’t going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it’s not there right now.”
Bashiok also confirmed that Blizzard working towards finalizing the contents of patch 1.0.4, which will be packed with a slew of fixes and changes.
“I think [the] patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they’re not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly it’s a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself still a ways out,” he added.
Diablo III has done quite well despite a rather shaky launch which was plagued by server crashes and issues with the Real Money Auction House. Both buyers and sellers have had problems paying and getting paid.
