Diablo 3 Wizards Go Nuclear

[MetalMagpie]

http://www.amazon.com/Warcraft-III-Battle-Chest-Mac/dp/B00009ECGK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343062708&sr=8-1&keywords=warcraft+3

Consider yourself corrected.

That's Amazon. Blizzard themselves...
http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=110000050
$40.

I will concede that if you can find a third party source you can get it cheaper.

Ah. Therein lies your mistake.

Never buy a game from the publisher.

EDIT: With the possible exception of Valve games on Steam.

 

[TK421]

Now Blizzard, what did we learn about putting a RMAH in our games?

Karma strikes again.

 

[MetalMagpie]

*Snip*

*Snip*

I'm not saying a game has to be perfect or that a developer CAN catch every bug, I'm saying that Blizzard didn't catch THIS one. I'd have thought testing for something like staking abilities would have been pretty basic, but as long as Blizzard DOES address the issue then that's fine. I just don't see exploiting a glitch in the game as ban worthy as I would a legitimate hack, especially since this isn't PvP.

Well, either the bug has been in the game since release. In which case it took millions of players three months to discover it. Which hardly makes it something easy to catch. Or it was introduced more recently in a patch. (Apparently the glitch involves stacking two abilities that it makes no real sense to stack, but I'm still leaning on it having been introduced in a recent patch. Millions of players do crazy things.)

In any case, that sort of thing is an absolutely bugger to automate testing for. So testing every combination of stacked abilities may well have involved someone sitting there and manually trying them all in turn. And then trying every combination of items too. No normal human being is going to be able to do that for a patch that needs to be out now now now in order to solve a current bug.

Fixing bugs in software often causes more bugs. It's one of life's little ironies. Remember the dragons flying backwards in Skyrim? That was introduced in a patch that was supposed to fix performance issues! (But the save-destroying patch for Fez really takes the biscuit.)

Banning players for using the glitch - on the other hand - I'm not so happy with. An understandable mistake by Blizzard is still a mistake by Blizzard. I don't especially see why players should be banned for exploiting it.

(Real Money Auction = Really Bad Idea. But that's just my opinion.)

 

[CardinalPiggles]

"ZOMG THEY HAVENT FIXED IT IN 3 HOURS! IVE LOST ALL FAITH IN BLIZZARD THEY CANT DO ANYTHING RIGHT DIABLO 3 IS A MASSIVE FAILURE"

This is what always happens, people will blow any small thing out of proportion because they have a general dislike towards a game. And of course more people will flock to the hate club.

My question is, if he doesn't like the game, why is he playing it? To find something wrong with it? That's pathetic.

 

[Zer_]

While an interesting solution for stopping players from turning to predatory gold/item buying websites, it seems that the real money AH is far more trouble than it's worth. If it didn't exist this exploit would be an insignificant problem; no game is without them even Blizzard's games. Instead of fake currency being gained from this people are now making actual money from cheating. Whatever your opinion on the right or wrongness of it the involvement of real money being exchanged will upset far more people than if it was just something you could use to farm gold easier.

Blizzard saw the huge market for Diablo 2 items, they tried their best to fight it, but in the end they just wanted a piece of the pie. They got what they wanted, but unfortunately for us long time fans, they shat on our faces in the process. I can't bring myself to touch Diablo 3 anymore. The RMAH just destroyed Diablo 3, and it will continue to do so no matter what Blizzard does. Their planned PVP combat is going to be fucked over by RMAH users spending hundreds of dollars to get an advantage.

I don't even know if I'll buy StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm after this, though I didn't mind SC2 overall, the lack of LAN play was always a bit of a thorn at my side.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Warcraft III is still $40 for the game + expansion, and that game is a decade old.

*shrugs*

I bought mine for 12 bucks in a box collection at Best Buy, new back in 2006.
Needed a replacement disc for Reign of Chaos, since my launch copy was uh...well, it had seen better days (an SUV and my game bag was involved).

Of course, this was before the days of Bnet 2.0, and when you could still find some PC Games in retail.

Why is this news again?

Can someone direct me to the article about the TF2 exploit where medics could become permanently invulnerable?

I mean this stuff is news worthy after all and not just rage bait, then we should have seen this last before.

Unless that Medic glitch in TF2 has profound implications on the Hat Economy (correct me if it does), then I don't think that's quite the fair comparison.

On the other hand, this still isn't terribly newsworthy for anyone who saw this coming.
It was very obvious even months before D3 launched that a real money auction house was inevitably going to motivate players into looking more thoroughly for glitches like this, and it is foolish in the extreme to assume that any game will be shipped glitch-free.

As for the nature of exploiting glitches, there is some small room for an ethical* debate about whether Blizzard should be banning people who exploit these glitches.
(*not legal, because Blizzard can ban users for any reason they see fit)

 

[MammothBlade]

This is nothing to get mad about.

It does perplex me though, who the f**k actually buys from a real money auction house?

 

[Callate]

This reminds me, somewhat, of YouTube.

Those of you have been on ze interwebs a while can probably remember when YouTube was kind of part of the Internet Wild West, a place where you could find just about anything including pornography and the latest hot television show sliced into numerous bite-sized pieces. Sometimes things got taken down, but popular things usually found their way back and mirrored.

Then Google bought YouTube, and suddenly it wasn't just a couple of clever programmers who could kind of shrug and semi-honestly say that they couldn't really do anything about the tsunami of IP infringements; there was real money involved, and Google certainly didn't buy into such a popular service with the idea of getting flayed in court.

Goodbye, much of the copyright infringement. Goodbye, Wild West atmosphere (yay?), hello three advertisements to watch a thirty second video clip (boo...)

How does this relate? Well, Diablo 2 was kind of Internet Wild West, too. And that was kind of, sort of, okay; no one was forcing you to play on Battle.Net, you could use more or less whatever version, mods, trainers or such you wanted in the privacy of your own home, and there was always local networked play if you wanted that multiplayer fix without cheaters and gold farmers.

But Blizzard decided they were going to do us a favor. Diablo III was going to be a service. They would take care of the massive problem (?) of people wanting to use the same character in solo and multiplayer play, and all those cheaters and gold farmers.

So now, like Google and YouTube, any problems that show up can't be shrugged off as inevitable flies in the ointment the powers that be could neither have predicted nor can be expected to fix.

Any problems with Diablo III, Blizzard owns.

Those poor sons-of-bitches.

 

[weirdee]

So just a quick question for the people who are trashing Blizzard for releasing an update with a glitch/bug in it:

Have you all played Skyrim?

due to diablo 3 being more like an mmo than a game with multiplayer options, the issues with balance are more dangerous than they are in skyrim, in which they've left the dev console open so that you can basically fiddle with any aspect of the game, even BEFORE implementing mods

frankly i don't know why i have to explain this

 

[Skeleon]

OH NOES, the fragile balance of the ingame economy!
Normally, this would just be a bad glitch that would be resolved, eh, quickly and no harm done, but the RMAH makes everything a lot more peculiar.

 

[irishda]

Diablo 3 Wizards Go Nuclear


This new Diablo 3 exploit will probably vanish soon, but while it lasts, wizards are gods.

If you listen very carefully, you'll hear Diablo 3 demon lords weeping into their snot-covered hankies. Yesterday a new exploit was discovered that allows wizards to turn into invincible death-ray spewing maniacs, and it works on hardcore mode. No doubt the ill-gotten gains that resulted from this killing spree are on their way to the Real Money Auction House even as I'm typing this. One kind soul even posted a video to YouTube explaining the deal.

In essence, it's a mix of the Teleport and Archon abilities. Done right, your wizard becomes a glowing blue twink which monsters usually ignore, unless of course you attack them. But as they haven't got a snowball in hell's chance of doing anything to you, your blue murder machine can sweep the dungeon clean, collecting a ton of loot along the way.

Screams of "Blizzard doesn't care about this game" are already being heard on the Diablo 3 forums. [http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6146816331?page=1] No word yet as to what Blizzard intends to do about the cheat. Even if the cheat itself is stopped, it's difficult to see what can be done about loot sold on the Auction House; and that means the cheat may have earned its exploiters actual cash.

Source: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-23-diablo-3-exploit-makes-wizards-invulnerable]

Permalink

UPDATE Blue post at about 10:30 pm EST says a hotfix is being rolled out to resolve the bug.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

But Blizzard decided they were going to do us a favor. Diablo III was going to be a service. They would take care of the massive problem (?) of people wanting to use the same character in solo and multiplayer play, and all those cheaters and gold farmers.

Oh, trust me on this...

Spoiler: Diablo 3 certainly WAS a service...

Except...they seemed to have taken care of the people wanting to play the game legitimately. Cheaters and gold farmers? Well......

 

[ckam]

Well, I kind of want to try this out.

 

[Aeonknight]

So just a quick question for the people who are trashing Blizzard for releasing an update with a glitch/bug in it:

Have you all played Skyrim?

due to diablo 3 being more like an mmo than a game with multiplayer options, the issues with balance are more dangerous than they are in skyrim, in which they've left the dev console open so that you can basically fiddle with any aspect of the game, even BEFORE implementing mods

frankly i don't know why i have to explain this

And I don't know why people such as yourself haven't learned to expect this. You can hide behind the "it's online so it's more critical" excuse if you'd like, but frankly, I'd be surprised if you can find a single developer that hasn't forgotten a semicolon at some point in time.

 

[PinkiePyro]

I am gonna assume if they were smart they would do a rollback I remeber years ago nexon had an issue on mabnogi where the coding for paldiens glitched and they gained the ability to kill anything and everything in 1 hit including other players they pa

ummm wtf?

As far as I'm aware, this has been around for about 3 hours now and still hasn't been patched

Is this guy retarded? He really thinks that they can make and release a patch in three hours?

I am gonna assume if they were smart they would do a rollback I remeber years ago nexon had an issue on mabnogi where the coding for paldiens glitched and they gained the ability to kill anything and everything in 1 hit including other players and it got patched in 3 hours (and had a rollback)
but of couse there was that paldin only guild that slaughtered a whole server (needless to say the whole guild was banned)

 

[tetron]

In today's news. Diablo 3 ! Still a broken pile of trash !

Blizzard is so lost without a PTR it's not even funny.

 

[Kragg]

If this is a legitimate combination of abilities that just happens to be insanely unbalanced instead of a true glitch (The article wasn't clear) then I hope the exploiters aren't punished. Nothing turns off gamers more than knowing that they'll be punished if they are too good at the game. (Or in this case, too good at picking abilities)

If you watched the video, you'd know that the exploit has to do with using two abilities simultaneously that the average person would normally never use at the same time. It's likely a glitch that has to do with you activating the Archon mode while in mid-teleport. (( Edit: Ninja'd xP ))

Also, real classy of the guy to give "props" to Blizzard for "letting another exploit slip by", because I'm sure that a QA department of any size is going to catch a glitch that took millions of fans a few months to accidentally trip over. I also love how this guy, who has probably been playing Diablo 3 since it came out, makes a point to talk about how shitty Diablo is. But then, at this point, I've lost all faith in Diablo fans; which is to say nothing that being compounded on top of my faith in gamers in general already being pretty low.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Bugs are hard to find and from my own experience they can come up in development (or even after development) at the worst of times. Also, his mocking of them for not fixing it in 3 hours is a clear sign he has absolutely no experience in making a game. This is a programming issue, and programmers will know that this sort of thing has no 'drag-and-drop' involved, it's all code. If a bug is found, the code has to be searched through. This isn't a simple case of looking through reams of code and changing something, there's a few steps to fixing a bug (programming terminology incoming, some words may not make real-world sense):

1) Searching: First you have to find the bug, and this can be very difficult. Knowing where to look is pretty hard, in this case there's gonna be at least a few places. I'd guess the searching would involve the Wizard class and all its methods, the class/method for teleportation and the other ability, and then there's still code to search through.

2) Evaluating: How the buggery are you going to fix this? It can be as simple as rearranging some blocks of code, or could entail a complete re-write and/or redesign of the code. This requires cost and time evaluations as well, so even considering fixing the bug takes time.

3) Doing: Fixing the actual bug can take time and cost money depending on how serious the issue is and/or how complicated it is to fix.

...3 Hours...

Also, despite the fact that someone posted a video a month ago with the exploit, if gaming magazines are only just now reporting the issue, then when do you think that Blizzard will have noticed it? (do you really think that the guy would've reported it)

just heads up that they did fix the bug in under 2 days after that vid was posted, assuming they started working on a fix the second that vid was put up

how can they not have known about this is my question, they must have someone reading metrics and if wizards were taking alot less damage than usual doing more damage, not dying as much, killing more etc etc not to mention passing bosses like Ghom who are reportedly bugged and near unkillable atm. maybe they did know, maybe they were working on it for some time, maybe they were waiting to patch it in a bigger patch, maybe they just plugged it now the word got out. Which is more likely?

 

[theultimateend]

Just to be clear: I don't own the game. I'm waiting until it's a bit cheaper before I try it. (Although - with sales still strong - it looks like it's going to be a while before the price even dips below £30.)

Ahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Blizzard? Put a game on SALE? Have you even MET this company before? If you're waiting for a price drop, I hope you are prepared to wait a very long time. Warcraft III is still $40 for the game + expansion, and that game is a decade old. Starcraft II is $40 while on sale and it's two years old. (Compare Skyrim dropping to $30 during the Steam sale for a game less than a year old) The game servers will likely be shut down long before they put it on sale for less than $30. (Or even 30 euros)

I've gotten wow, burning crusade, warcraft 3 and expansion, and wotlk all on sale >_>.

SC2 has even been on sale since I bought it.

They just don't have them on sale all the time.

This is nothing to get mad about.

It does perplex me though, who the f**k actually buys from a real money auction house?

People who buy from gold selling sites? I would assume.

 

[Jmp_man]

Just thought that I would put this up here real quick:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6147946861

Apparently people had MORE fun being invincible rather than meat-sacks. Also of not is the fact that people now realize that farming the later acts is exactly the same as farming the earlier acts.

Just thought it was an interesting read considering the fact that everyone was screaming at Blizz to fix the glitch.

 

[Zenn3k]

If this is a legitimate combination of abilities that just happens to be insanely unbalanced instead of a true glitch (The article wasn't clear) then I hope the exploiters aren't punished. Nothing turns off gamers more than knowing that they'll be punished if they are too good at the game. (Or in this case, too good at picking abilities)

You mean like what they did to increased attack speed?

Gamers saw it was good, so they geared with it in mind...then Blizzard HALFED its power.

If I didn't hate this game so much, I might load it up just to try this exploit with my Wizard (who i THINK is high enough to do it)...

EDIT: Its apparently been fixed, so yeah, still not logging into Battlenet

Its kinda sad that the only thing that could interest me into playing D3 again, is an exploit like this...everything else about the game is so incredibly bad.