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Exploitgate 2012

Jul 25

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If you haven’t already heard, there was an exploit discovered in Diablo 3 that allowed Wizards to become invincible, permanently. By “discovered,” I mean formally discovered, since there was a Youtube video uploaded June 22nd ostensively showing the same thing. As in, this exploit has been active for at least a full month.

And it was not even something super-complicated. From the Kotaku article:

Step 1: Select Teleport – Fracture. Bind it to a key
Step 2: Select Archon, tested with Improved Archon
Step 3: Hover your mouse over or near your charcter
Step 4: Press Teleport
Step 5: QUICKLY(!) Press Archon

Blizzard has since pushed a hotfix to plug the hole, complete with rolling restarts, yadda yadda. Of course, the Wizard hotfix did not fix the Barbarian exploit that allowed them to gain +8% of their HP with every attack. That process is pretty simple too:

1. Have Furious Charge with Dreadnought Rune
2. Charge into opening cinematic (before it begins)

Now, if you are like me and played with/as a Barbarian, you might be wondering how that sort of life gain is even considered an exploit – Barbarians gaining insane amounts of life back and breezing through Inferno has always appeared to be the class Working As Intended™. But then, Kripparrian made a Youtube video that was all “Yo dawg, I heard you like exploits, so I put an exploit in your exploit.”

Honestly, his Jay Wilson joke is probably better than mine. And so are these.

There are a lot of different directions the resulting narrative can go – should we start postulating about the economic damage generated by these exploits, or what happens to one’s Battle.net balance when banned? – but beyond the delicious embarrassment of it all, what can honestly be said that was not already predicted months before the game was even released? Everyone knew there would be exploits. Everyone knew the existence of a cash-shop makes exploits worse. And here we are.

It does make me slightly nostalgic for WoW, though. Remember when exploits were more whimsical? You had your cutting-edge hardcore raiding guilds with their Saronite Bombs and trash mob buffs from other boss rooms. You had have your Mining bots teleporting under the ground and dumping 400+ stacks of ore on the AH with 12-hour auctions nearly below vendor price. Maybe some people sneaking through the Arathi Basin gates before the start put a damper on things, but it was only really terrible if AB was the random daily that day.

This Diablo 3 thing, though? Good lord. Nothing like knowing someone else probably made off with $1000 in drops by trivializing the content you are smashing your face into, to take the wind out of your sails. Hell, any one of us might have bought an item from them. If I hadn’t already stopped playing, I would at this sort of news.

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Design Notes I Like to See

May 30

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From the latest Dev Blog:

That said, we also wanted to let you know we’re keeping a close eye on Inferno. The intent of incoming damage is that it should be a very consistent drain on your health, and mitigating that drain is a major part of what makes Inferno mode difficult. Right now, there’s a lot more damage “spikiness” occurring than feels right, and that’s one major area we’re looking to adjust in patch 1.0.3. While we don’t have any specifics yet, our design goals are to support and promote build diversity; continue to ensure that a mix of champion packs, rare packs, and boss fights are the most efficient way to acquire the best items in the game; and ensure that all classes are viable in Inferno.

[…]

We’ve also seen some people saying our intention with Inferno is just one-shot you to make it difficult. While damage is a bit spikier than we’d like, we’re actually seeing a pretty significant number of people attempting Inferno without sufficient gear. There’s a good chance that returning to the previous Act to farm upgrades will do the most to help you survive. That said, we’d like to shift some of the focus away from survival and more toward using a variety of offensive tactics to succeed. Survival will still be important, but finding ways to maximize your damage while staying alive is more exciting. We’re not particularly concerned with whether or not a boss is “beatable,” though it should feel epic and challenging to defeat it. We’re more concerned with ensuring that acquiring 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor and taking on as many Champions and Rares as you can remains the most challenging and rewarding way to play.

And then there is this bit about the crafting:

Other areas of concern have been both the gem combination system and Blacksmith leveling and crafting costs. The intent, especially with the Blacksmith, is that he’s leveling with you, you’re able to use him as an alternate source for upgrades. Our design goal is that once you get to level 60, his recipes are actually good enough to help fill a character’s potential itemization gaps. To correct these issues, we’re looking to adjust the Blacksmith costs for training (gold and pages) and crafting from levels 1-59, and reduce the cost of combining gems so that it only requires two gems instead of three (up to Flawless Square). Both of these changes are scheduled for patch 1.0.3.

I had been avoiding crafting altogether because A) what’s the point when you have access to the AH, and B) what’s the point when vendoring magic items is more profitable than Salvaging them? Then again, the Commodities portion of the AH has been down since launch (I believe) and I am somewhat convinced it was precisely to get people to do their own crafting/salvaging.

In any case, after hearing the news that maybe the endgame isn’t supposed to be about endlessly kiting mobs around, I leveled up the Monk up to 17 to get Seven-Sided Strike. Decently fun ability. While I was moving talents around, I decided to give Crippling Wave another try as my left-click ability now that I unlocked a Rune for it. As soon as I did this, I ran into a pack of the flying wasp creatures and proceeded to get kited the fuck around. I cannot imagine a worse feeling than getting kited around by a mob in a hack-n-slash game.

So I logged back onto the Witch Doctor, looking for that cave with the first piece of the sword. As I was walking around, I encountered one of those bull-like creatures with the charge attack. That one move by an otherwise unremarkable mob one-shot my Zombie Dogs.

All of them.

Translation: Fuck this game.

While on the level 6 Wizard, it occurred to me that I have no particular desire to kite things. If a bunch of zombie torsos leap (!) out of the bushes, I do not want my first instinct to be to Frost Nova and left-click myself away. Nor do I want to wait for however many levels it takes to get the spells necessary to actually deal what feels like some legitimate damage.

So I did the only thing left of me. I uninstalled rolled Barbarian.

Two Lords A-Leaping~

Now, this? This feels good.

P.S. And this doesn’t look bad either.

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