Diablo III

John_Reynolds · 2014-08-27T20:41:03.000Z

TheWombat:

So far the best thing about the patch is the new stash tab.

No, the blacksmith’s new trash buttons are a godsend. Click-click, back to fighting.

olaf · 2014-08-27T21:38:01.000Z

sharaleo:

I seriously doubt it has anything to do with lack of talent or ability, or budget for that matter.

Blizzard the business has decided what is an acceptable SLA for their services and how maintenance downtime fits into that. This is what they then ask IT to deliver, with a commensurate budget. I would bet dollars to donuts the business has simply determined that 6 hour outages every other week has little impact on it’s bottom line, so sets the SLA and budget accordingly. History has probably demonstrated to them that this kind of window is ultimately acceptable to its customer base, particularly when sufficient notice periods are given.

Yes, IT can achieve extremely high up-times with modern infrastructure, software and enterprise architectures, but it still does not come cheap. There is still a vast difference in the cost of delivering RPO/RTO/maintenance downtime of zero, vs 60 minutes, and again vs 6 hours. Business weighs up the cost vs the impact and decides what is acceptable within budget constraints.

If you are a financial agency that may stand to lose thousand$ or even million$ a second to downtime, you cough up the dough. If you’re Blizzard and you are just going to have some customers that can’t play a luxury for an hour or two in an off-peak period, with a very small number of those whinging on forums and an even smaller number again cancelling subs or refusing to buy new product, you can probably decide to spend less and give more back to the shareholders.

This. I have been in IT since the late 90s. You get what you pay for and Blizzard obviously does not feel it financially when D3 is unstable for a couple of days, so what incentive do they have to spend a whole bunch more money, whether thats in headcount, hardware, tools or bandwidth/products from their providers, to guard against the edge case?

TheWombat · 2014-08-28T05:17:19.000Z

John Reynolds:

No, the blacksmith’s new trash buttons are a godsend. Click-click, back to fighting.

Ok, I’ll grant you that. Stash tab + insta-salvage = win.

sharaleo · 2014-08-28T05:33:16.000Z

Anyone know if seasons are going to be story mode or adventure mode?

dgallina · 2014-08-28T06:31:19.000Z

The huge maintenance windows wouldn’t be bad if they only affected online play. The problem is that the PC / mac versions ONLY have online play. For me this is one of the big advantages of the console version.
Diego

tryte · 2014-08-28T10:28:33.000Z

sharaleo:

Anyone know if seasons are going to be story mode or adventure mode?

Good question: I’m hoping they’ll give you the option so I don’t have to suffer through the story for the umpteenth time.

I’m really liking the quality of life improvements with the patch, but haven’t found any of the new rift or gem stuff yet. It’s fun running around in Firebirds finally and shooting laser beams though.

stusser · 2014-08-28T10:30:26.000Z

If you unlocked Adventure mode in your non-seasonal -core (soft or hardcore), that same -core will be unlocked in seasons.

That’s the only piece of progress that passes over. Beyond adventure mode unlocking, seasons are a complete fresh slate. No money, paragon points, stash, crafters are level 1, etc.

ARogan · 2014-08-28T11:47:42.000Z

How do greater rift stones of different ranks work in a party? So say each person in the party has a different rank greater rift stone, what level greater rift does it open?

forgeforsaken · 2014-08-28T12:00:14.000Z

ARogan:

How do greater rift stones of different ranks work in a party? So say each person in the party has a different rank greater rift stone, what level greater rift does it open?

It opens the one with the guy that initiated it, everyone else must have greater or equal stone to enter.

MrGrumpy · 2014-08-28T19:14:51.000Z

Started playing again. Haven’t changed anything on my arcane wizard, looks like I should. Feels more difficult, or at least I’m experiencing more deaths (playing just T3.) My first greater rift run sucked, 3 unicorn levels. :( Never having been there I wasted lots of time being lost. :|
I did find a treasure goblin lair though. That was awesome. And really lucrative, made close to 30 million gold lol.

olaf · 2014-08-28T20:46:06.000Z

The unicorn levels suck bad in Greater Rifts. The mob density is shit and you really are under the gun time wise to find the exit ASAP to get to a better level. They need to fix that. I have not seen the treasure goblin zone yet. 30 mil gold from one haul is fucking nuts though. I have about 35 mil gold total…and get maybe 500k to 1m gold on a T5 Rift, with the 100% gold drop and double goblin buff.

Razgon · 2014-08-28T22:01:07.000Z

Is there any use for that kind of money even?

Squee · 2014-08-28T22:37:31.000Z

Razgon:

Is there any use for that kind of money even?

Crafting gems is expensive as absolute hell. And gems are required to do enchanting on some higher-end uniques, so yeah. There’s definitely a use for all that money.

Driving me crazy since I’ve played for a good few hours since the patch hit and have yet to get a goblin portal. Apparently they don’t show up in rifts which is a shame, but I’m not all that enthused about doing bounties when I’ve got 200+ rift fragments in my stash and around 50 on each of my characters. Did bounties like crazy before the patch and figured I’d be set for rifting for a long while, but now I kinda wanna beat up some goblins while the double goblin and double gold find is going on so I can get some money.

stusser · 2014-08-29T06:52:53.000Z

There was a bug for a day causing treasure goblins to spawn every time in a certain level. Some people obviously did that level over and over, and reportedly got one treasure portal every 150 or so goblins. So, don’t hold your breath.

Harkonis · 2014-08-29T08:03:05.000Z

I spent 30 mil today on gem combines, almost out of money now and not making it nearly fast enough.

stusser · 2014-08-29T08:35:28.000Z

I agree, goldsinks seem a bit too aggressive, particularly since the game has no economy. You can’t trade with other players, so why not relax escalating costs on enchanting and gem combine costs a bit? Or at least, cap enchanting costs at a high but not ridiculous number?

tryte · 2014-08-29T10:25:36.000Z

Agreed on the aggressiveness, and having to pay over a million to unsocket my gems to try different builds is ridiculous.

instant0 · 2014-08-29T11:53:52.000Z

I had 35m yesterday. A few gems later, and a lot of failed enchants to get a socket, and I have 3m.
Friend did Torment VI and got into the Treasure Vault and got around 70m, when we did it on Torment 3 we got around 30m.

Mysterio · 2014-08-29T14:48:26.000Z

So I patched to the latest version and now all of my achievements are missing (screen shows “Missing!” at the top and error messages where the achievements should be). They were fine in the prior version.

Anyone else have this happen to them after updating to 2.1.0? I’m re-installing, now.

stusser · 2014-08-29T15:53:48.000Z

Don’t reinstall, it’s a serverside bug. Try switching your locale to EU in the launcher, starting the game, quitting, switching back to US, and starting it up again.