Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

Saw an interesting story on Hacker News from a guy who botted the auction house and made bank. Pretty cool read:A Diablo 3 Story: A Diablo 3 Story

I found it interesting how little Blizzard actually did to curb this behaviour and the analogy with high-frequency trading, but they were probably making a tidy sum from the auction fees.

The guy is also making me regret I never learned programming.

It's very impressive to see how many queries you could send that AH database. I can tell you that Blizzard knew about it from the start, and that their AH system was designed for this kind of trading. It would have been quite easy to limit the number of queries per unit of time, or insta ban account that do more than 2+ AH queries a second for a long period of time.

Think about people who do that in WoW so much monay

There were two stupid aspects of the auction house at release: 1) no refresh for a search and 2) a confirmation button to buy with no hotkey. Bots and automated tools obviously could get around these at super speeds so the only way a true buyer or item flipper could compete was to do the same with auto-it scripts or something similar.

I think I had five different mouse button scripts: 1) one click buy, 2) increment the top stat field by 1 and search again to refresh, 3) increment price by 10000, 4) decrement by 10000, 5) reset. After that it became a race to refresh as fast as possible, mouse over the icon to view the stats and be able to identify in a split second if an item was underpriced and buy before the bots did.

Hake_sl said:

It's very impressive to see how many queries you could send that AH database. I can tell you that Blizzard knew about it from the start, and that their AH system was designed for this kind of trading. It would have been quite easy to limit the number of queries per unit of time, or insta ban account that do more than 2+ AH queries a second for a long period of time.

Think about people who do that in WoW

so much monay

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Maybe it was market research for the Titan AH?

Anyone using a cold build should probably start farming for rimehearts.They are getting retroactively buffed such that the proc does 10,000% weapon dmg.

Are you sure? I thought they didn't want the current proc in the game at all since it trivializes greater rifts, especially now that you don't need to kill the RG during the alotted time; you only need to get him to spawn.

Monkey King's Garb 4 piece Bonus: Spending 75 Spirit causes a decoy to spawn that taunts nearby enemies and then explodes for 3500% (up from 1600%) weapon damage as Holy.

Sweeping Wind : Damage increased to 105% weapon damage (up from 60%). Damage at 3 stacks increased to 315% weapon damage (up from 180%).
Blade Storm : Damage per stack increased to 145% weapon damage (up from 85%). Damage at 3 stacks increased to 435% weapon damage (up from 255%).
Cyclone : Lightning tornado damage increased to 95% weapon damage (up from 35%).

See Tort, monks are coming along (much slower than others). I suspect more buffs to them very very soon!

They could at least start the new season if the patch still isnt ready.
At this point my barb is stacked and i got nothing to aim for. I dont want to start a new toon since i want access to the new shit on the ladder. So am stuck with nothing to do.

If they triple the damage of a few other monk spenders we might almost be competitive!

Oh other builds than pure single element / 1-2 cookie cutters will become viable? Damn.

Nirgon_sl said:

Oh other builds than pure single element / 1-2 cookie cutters will become viable? Damn.

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Ehhhh. It depends on the class. Most classes are probably still gonna be stuck with 1 or 2 possibilities for decent T6 runs. Some classes are moving from 1/2 elements to 1/2 other elements (Monks in particular look to be element migrating). There's some nice buffs and tweaks to most of the classes but for Barbs/Monks they still look to be very underwhelming, with their spenders being garbage overall and their builders less than spectacular. Monk builders got pretty significant buffs last ptr patch so along with sweeping winds buffs this cycle, it looks like a more old-fashioned Builder+SW+Mantra+3 cooldowns build.

Rombo_sl said:

They could at least start the new season if the patch still isnt ready.
At this point my barb is stacked and i got nothing to aim for. I dont want to start a new toon since i want access to the new shit on the ladder. So am stuck with nothing to do.

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Start a new season on the PTR?

Eh? On the live server. Just start it and apply the patch, which will prolly take another year or 2, once its ready.

The infrastructure and code for something like seasons is not insignificant and likely highly integrated into the rest of the game at this point. It would probably takes weeks of work to get it separated out, along with leaderboards/greater rifts/seasonal legendaries/legendary gems/etc., all the stuff that is TIED to seasons and half the reason for them to exist. If you want a reset that bad just make a new character, don't use paragons, and don't use gold same difference.

Rombo_sl said:

Eh? On the live server. Just start it and apply the patch, which will prolly take another year or 2, once its ready.

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The patchis seasons. /facepalm

Riiiiiight, we couldnt have the items and class changes simply applied to the new ladder and let players who actually wanna level a new toon RIGHT NOW without losing all the time invested in them because the new ladder wont allow these new toons to be transfered over. Too much computer magic.

Watch your head Grayson

Rombo_sl said:

Riiiiiight, we couldnt have the items and class changes simply applied to the new ladder and let players who actually wanna level a new toon RIGHT NOW without losing all the time invested in them because the new ladder wont allow these new toons to be transfered over. Too much computer magic.

Watch your head Grayson

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I'm trying to comprehend what you're saying, and needless to say. I'm lost. I have no clue what you're trying to infer, but it sounds like you're not aware of something. Ladder/Seasons is a new start. You don't get a jump start now, for later.