Funny how people are completely convinced that since World of Warcraft has been around for 7 years, that there isn't anything left to exploit and all of the holes have been plugged. :)
What's even scarier, though, are the people who believe that "hacks" and "duping" have never happened in WOW. I see these arguments on forums all the time.. and it's very depressing each and very time. (Duping is still a common problem in WOW, and it's going to happen in Diablo 3 too.)
Anyways.. apparently, MMR exploits in World of Warcraft are still around. I don't really follow WOW anymore and I just learned about this by accident. I thought it was worth mentioning..
In fact, I can't remember a time when there HASN'T been a Match Making exploit available in WOW. These types of exploits have been around since Arenas were first launched. More details here on Reddit, and here's a link to the exploit. Users are trying to get as many people to know about the exploit as possible, so that Blizzard will do something about it.
The GCD hack was always my favorite though.
* The big news is that the Beta Opt In rules have suddenly been changed. Previously, it was anyone who owned an Active Battle.net account which required any Blizzard game. Now, it's only anyone with an active World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2 account.
So, for those veteran accounts who have been playing Diablo 2 for 10 years.. they have no chance of getting into the Diablo 3 beta. Starcraft 2 players do, though.
The claim was later refuted, reconfirmed, refuted, reconfirmed, and then refuted again. These were all done by CMs or GMs.. so who really knows what internal rules are really being followed.
I've been told that there are other unofficial rules too.. like unsupported video cards won't make the beta, certain system specs, and "flagged accounts".
What's really interesting about this sudden change in the beta rules, is that it comes 1 week after I wrote about this exact same strategy. I've always known that the blog was monitored by Blizzard, and thankfully Daeity had hooked me up with some tools to track that sort of thing. There's a Blizzard system, for example, that has been "pinging" the blog twice a day at pre programmed intervals for quite a while now. It "watches" front page and new posts only. Just a very strange coincidence that after that blogspot about B.Net accounts, they changed the rules exactly for that situation. :)
* If you're interested in a Diablo 3 Beta "Offline Crack", there's a server emulator in the works. You can get all the information you want here. It's very early stages and something marginally playable is still several weeks away.
* More news from Rockstar, as expected. The release date for Max Payne 3 has been announced.. once that's out of the way, should free up some room for a RDR PC port announcement.
* Blizzard announced 6 games within the next 3 years at the recent Citigroup conference. These games are: Diablo 3, D3 X1, SC2 X2, SC2, X3, WOW X4, and WOW X5. This is all very very old news though and practically everyone already knew all about this. Not sure why this was suddenly "news" on so many gaming sites.
* I was going to add a bunch of stuff about illegal online gambling in this post, but it got so huge that I had to create a brand new post for it. I'll put it up later when it's done.
* I was thinking about writing an article on the "New" Diablo 3 Blackmarket that will emerge. You know, potential changes to the blackmarket now that Blizzard is running their own ingame Cash Auction House.
For example; because RMAH will not be available to Hardcore players, that's one market where items will be available. Because of the rarity and risk involved for farmers, the value of items will be substantially more expensive than Blizzard's RMAH. The size of the Hardcore community is a factor at play here too.
Third party websites will also sell the cheaper items (but in larger volume) with no listing fees. The big seller here won't necessarily be high end gear, but probably items or mats instead.
But, what other kind of stuff? Maybe Hardcore character sales? Maybe even the same stuff sold on the RMAH, but without the listing fee. It all depends on the listing fee, but I'll be pretty disappointed if it's more than $0.20 per item.
I really like the new RMAH, mostly because it's new and different for such a popular franchise, and it creates new forms of competition and tactics in the industry. I'm looking forwards to seeing how the market will evolve, and how Blizzard will combat competitors.
Apparently, I'm going to be very busy over the next little while. :) If I spot anything unusual or interesting, I'll make another update.. but for now there are a lot of D3 videos and streams available for your viewing pleasure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiCwATxb0a0 (Demonhunter Gameplay)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI4ya75Gig8 (Barbarian Gameplay)
http://www.twitch.tv/day9tv
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nomsayin
http://www.diablounderground.com/diablo-underground-live-stream
http://www.twitch.tv/wigens/b/294468076
http://www.justin.tv/orbitzun4/#/w/1730301568
http://www.twitch.tv/wigens#/w/1730431056
http://www.twitch.tv/crypto137
http://www.justin.tv/fluddastud#/w/1730241232
http://www.livestream.com/pushbuttan
You'd assume that many of them were D2 fans, but judging by their gameplay it's like they've never played an Action RPG before (some, not all). I also haven't seen any "Beta Feedback" menu systems, confirming previous beliefs about it's true purpose. :)
I've also updated a few items on the previous post (Unofficial Diablo 3 Features).
** Okay, so it looks like I won't be as busy as I thought.
I've seen a full play through of the D3 Beta on 3 classes now and it's become very repetitive.
Funny how everything about the beta is now old news to me. People will still be talking about it for the rest of the day and the week.. but if it's over 30 minutes old, then it's old news. :)
Take the D3 DOTA discovery I had made for example. It took at least 4-6 hours before it was even discussed on forums by anyone else (and was still not posted on any gaming news sites), and when I saw it, I thought to myself; wow, that's really old news. A lot of the other stuff in that same "Unofficial Features" post still hasn't made it to the web surprisingly.
This is what the internet has done to me.. if it's 1 hour old, it's really old news, and might as well be from a couple weeks ago.
Anyways, I really have no interest in watching any more videos or streams. I've seen it all now. The beta was a lot shorter than I had imagined and the bosses a little too easy, but overall it looks pretty awesome (I especially enjoyed the voice acting, lore, and audio) and I'm looking forwards to the live retail.