If you weren't already aware, there's been a bug in the Diablo beta that has been around for a long time now that makes it possible for a 5th player to join a party.

Incgamers recently made a post about it that shows the actual bug in action. There's a direct link to the video here and you can see it happen immediately at the 2:03:22 mark.

I wanted to point out something interesting about this "bug" that most players might not have noticed or understood about video game logic.

Did you notice that there's a 5th invisible portrait window already in the game? If this were a bug, why are there logical in-game systems in place to support the addition of a 5th player to the party? Not only that, but you can interact with this portrait window and see player information.

If this were truly a bug, and the game was not designed for 4+ player parties, none of this would be possible.

A fifth person could join the game, but there shouldn't be a fifth portrait window prepared for this user and there shouldn't be other logical systems in place to support more than 4 players. What this means is that the interface was designed for supporting a minimum of 5 players. And, I say "minimum" because there's still plenty of space (and small scaling of player portraits) on the left-hand side to support more than 5 "invisible portrait boxes". :)

This isn't a "5th player bug".. it's a bug in their player number restriction system, and players are able to bypass it to get more players (which are actually supported by the game.) Much like the public channels (which have been probably in the game for over a year now), it's really just an on/off switch that Blizzard controls. The game is designed to support more than 4 players, but Blizzard has it switched off for some reason.

It could be because of console limitations or their design plans for co-op, perhaps they were originally planning on 5 for the current game or as part of the future Diablo 3 X1 expansion (group increases in size with the introduction of new classes), or maybe the developers had problems scaling the monsters so it was easier just to make it 4 players. I think that a lot of players believe the latter.. that it was for scaling purposes.

So, something occurred to me. What if the game didn't just support a 5th player portrait window, but also other in-game systems already.. like scaling?

Guess what? It does.

When a fifth player joins the party, you will actually receive an alert ("A new ally has joined, but the minions of Hell grow stronger") and the monsters properly scale/grow in power with the addition of a fifth player. (There are also other windows/UIs beyond the party menu that demonstrate the in-game logic for supporting 5+ total players.)

So, adding a 5th player is not a bug. The only bug is that players can bypass the security lockout that prevents the 5th player from joining.

But, it's interesting to know that the game was designed to support a minimum of 5 players, the current game fully supports it, and monsters will scale when the 5th player joins.

This begs the question; why is there a 4 player limit? It's not due to scaling issues, it's definitely not an infrastructure or processing problem, the game was DESIGNED to support more than 4 players, it's not for testing purposes, and it's not revenue driven (ie, Blizzard wouldn't create a paid service that "upgrades" the player limit.) Blizzard specifically picked 4 for some reason, even though the game (and gameplay) supports 5 and more. They apparently don't plan on unlocking this (since it's "a bug") for a future Expansion Pack.. so why did they select 4?

Although highly unlikely (according to Blizzard), if something in the future is planned, perhaps the 5+ party isn't for "normal parties" but rather a support mechanism for special dungeons (raids) or large scale PVP combat teams.

And here's something else to think about: If this bug can be reproduced in the retail (which players will probably find a way), what kind of exploitation potential will there be for 5-8 player Inferno parties where the monsters can be killed more quickly by MF-geared players. (Apparently, loot drops don't scale with the mobs.. however loot scaling has been both confirmed and denied by Blizzard.)

* UPDATE:

Apparently, back in August 2011, Jay Wilson confirmed that the game was designed for 6 players maximum, but they didn't like the chaos of having 5-6 players on the screen at once, so they were "playing around with 4" which they believe would be the eventual maximum party size.

So, as suspected, the game was designed for at least 5 players (6 being the programming logic cap), it has the math to support it, and it appears that rather than going back and reworking a lot of the code (which would take a lot of time), they simply locked the max party size to 4, even though the game supports more.

Considering this, it is entirely possible that users might find a way to get at least 6 players in a party (in the beta, but hopefully they won't close all of the gaps by retail.)

Highlights from the call and Fourth Quarter 2011 financial results include:

• No release date announcement. Big shocker.

• Diablo 3 has been delayed to Q2: "The company's first quarter 2012 outlook does not incorporate a new release from Blizzard Entertainment."
  
  Well, I guess we finally have our answer. "Early 2012" actually means "Mid 2012".

• WOW has 10.2 Million Subscribers as of 12/31/11. (During their last conference call, they announced 10.3 million.)

• Calendar year 2012 outlook anticipates two releases from Blizzard Entertainment. Looks like SC2 HOTS has been delayed to 2013.

• There are approximately 50M monthly active users across Battle.net, CoD multiplayer, CoD Elite, and Skylanders WebWorld.

By the way, with all of the new people joining this call (potentially thousands of anxious fans, especially because direct links were advertised on Reddit and various Diablo forums), this is why it's so important for Blizzard to state ahead of time that the release date announcement WILL NOT be revealed at their upcoming conference call. When they don't do that, they're just trolling their customers.

Blizzard "Community Managers" (which is a form of PR) and Support staff frequently state that there are upcoming surprises, surprises planned, and surprise announcements. Because of this, people will grow even more suspicious when they say "Oh yeah.. this upcoming event is no big deal. You should really just go to your favorite site for the highlights of the call." It's like anticipating a surprise birthday party while your friends and family try to act nonchalant.

The reason they should notify their customers ahead of time is because, one of these days, an angry fan is going to raise a question during the open Q&A period for all of Activision Blizzard's employees and investors to hear: "Hey, Mike.. why is Bashiok such a troll?" Except, it will probably be worse.

"Early 2012"

Just to be clear, "Early 2012" means Q1. Blizzard even confirmed that this was their "internal definition." Bashiok never recanted his statement, he re-confirmed it.

There's a big difference between making a typo/mistake and the mistake of accidentally revealing something.

If someone were to accidentally leak Titan MMO game details, and they were to tweet "That was a mistake," it doesn't make it any less true that the game details were real.

Bashiok: Sorry I wasn't intending to imply anything by writing first quarter, just an honest mistake. Our official target is still "early 2012". Not sure if it makes too much difference one way or the other, but I don't want people to nitpick a mistake. :)

As Bashiok said, it doesn't make any difference one way or the other.. whether he writes it as Q1 or "Early 2012", it means the same thing.

Just a mistake on my part. Q1 is definitely more literal, so I suppose I should correct it.

Here, Bashiok confirms that Q1 is definitely more literal or accurate than saying "Early 2012".

If it was a typo or a mistake, then it would have meant that "Early 2012" means Q1-Q2 or "included Q2."

And moments ago, Bashiok just RE-re-confirmed that "Early 2012" always meant Q1, but now they just changed it this week to Q2 instead.

We've only ever said "early 2012". And we just decided we'd need until Q2 this week. Seems like the conference call was as good a place as any to announce that.

It's been delayed again; from Q1 to Q2.

When Will It Be Announced?

So, apparently, Blizzard was indeed intending on announcing the release date this week just as predicted. It was probably no coincidence that all of those Battle.net changes (5+ hour outages) were taking place and you didn't see the results. They truly were preparing for the release date announcement this week.

It's also no coincidence that the Battle.net Balance and PayPal features were implemented on Monday, which I had said would logically be accompanying the Release Date announcement.

To recap, for a couple months I have been predicting a 80% chance of a release date announcement right before the Q4 call. This was based on Blizzard's "promise" that their game would be coming out in Q1. However, I had also said that if an announcement was not made on the Monday, that the chances diminish substantially, and it means that the game will be delayed to Q2 (if still not announced before the call.) This week was really their only last option.

Maybe the new delay was related to the various Battle.net Balance problems they were having?

I'm currently waiting for the call recording to go live so that I can listen to it again. Mike Morhaime possibly mentioned that the release date schedule for the Diablo 3 release would be announced in the coming weeks.

The thing is, they can't make the announcement within the next 2-3 weeks. I mean they COULD, but if they did, it would imply that they actually KNOW the release date right now. Meaning that Q2 was planned before this week and they could have still made the announcement this week.

Plus, for such a major finance related item, it doesn't make any sense to announce it immediately after a major investor call rather than before. This means that the release date announcement has to be made late February or in March. Given a minimum of 2 months lead time for all of their past titles, this means that the game will be coming out in May at the earliest.

But, as I said, if they do announce within the next 2-3 weeks, then it means they actually know the real release date TODAY. And that would be very bad, considering that they could have announced it this week and it would have benefited them more greatly, especially from an investor perspective, while also avoiding many negative incidents (such as the forum outrage and angry frustration over the past 3 blog articles.) And, if THAT happens, it means that the decision "this week" was more personally motivated rather than business. :)

I've received a couple more Path of Exile keys, and I'll be giving away one tomorrow here at 12:00PM PST.

And speaking of tomorrow,

The Activision Blizzard investor call will be taking place at 1:30PM PST.

If you want to skip the call and just find out if they're going to be making a release date announcement (which they shouldn't be), all you need to do is keep refreshing this page as 1:30PM approaches. They'll typically post their results on this page about 5 minutes before the call starts.

Just open the HTML file ("... Fourth Quarter 2011 Net Revenus and Earnings"), and if it's in there (for some bizarre reason) it will be in the Business Highlights up near the top. Also, checkout the "Company Outlook" section right below for anything about future games.

I'm expecting to be disappointed though.

* UPDATE:

And, here's the key!

FR9QU-DY7B4-EBDFH-3____

Jumbled Letters: X 3 L C