“The launch week of Diablo III lengthy forum post addressing the state of Blizzard’s action-RPG.

Morhaime pointed out that Diablo III sold more in a few weeks than World of Warcraft: Cataclysm did since launch, and pointed out why there were so many issues on launch day. “We’ve never gone from 0 to more than 6 million players across multiple continents within a few days with a brand-new game. For Diablo III, we looked at historical sales for Blizzard games and other top-selling PC games and watched preorder numbers. We even upped our estimates to ensure we had additional capacity, or so we thought. In the end, it just wasn’t enough, and that is something we will work hard to conquer for future releases.”Looking forward, Morhaime reinforced the notion that Diablo III is a game meant to be played over and over again instead of dropped after a few weeks. “The Diablo III team has made an epic, entertaining, and beautiful gaming experience. That being said, we know that it isn’t perfect. Our teams are working hard to improve the game balance, build on our design, and listen to what players are saying to make it the best game it can be.”The next major patch, 1.0.4, is supposed to address balance issues. Though Diablo III features a very flexible character customization system where you can easily swap around skill builds to try out different styles of play with each class, at higher difficulty settings only a few skills function effectively. “This update will contain changes designed to further deliver on the team’s goal of promoting “build diversity,” with buffs to many rarely used, underpowered class abilities.” Blizzard is also working to make its Legendary items more interesting and useful, so when patch 1.0.4 is ready, those items will be adjusted in “ways you probably won’t be expecting.”He also reiterated the reasoning behind implementing a real money auction house in Diablo III, saying “our primary goal for including this in the game was to provide convenience and peace of mind for those players who might otherwise turn to third-party services to buy items. Black market trading sites can put accounts at risk and create many customer service challenges. We felt that the players themselves also deserved the opportunity to benefit from the extra loot they found, as opposed to having all of the benefit go to the black market/illegal trading organizations.”Many have complained how using the auction house to buy new items felt necessary in Inferno difficulty, which Morhaime said Blizzard is also hoping to address. “We are also committed to ensuring you have a great experience with Diablo III without feeling like the auction house is mandatory, which was never our intention. Thank you for all the feedback about that.” He did not provide specifics about what’s being done.Morhaime defended Diablo III’s always-online requirement, saying “while there are some downsides to the online-only approach, I still believe this was the best long-term decision for the game.” He noted, “While we’ve never said that this requirement guarantees that there will be no cheating or game cracks, it does help us battle those problems (we have not found any fully functional cracks). More important to us is that the online requirement is critical for the long-term integrity of the game experience.”One of the major features still not implemented in the game is the player versus player arena, which is currently planned to be included in the 1.1 update. “This patch will also build on the social and auction house changes I mentioned above, and the team will continue to fix bugs and further tune game balance as well,” said Morhaime, but he did not provide a timetable for 1.1.Also interesting were Morhaime’s final words about a new mechanic for level-capped characters. “We’re also working on a gameplay system that will provide players who have max-level, high-powered characters new goals to strive for as an alternative to the “item hunt.” We’re not ready to get into specifics just yet, but I can say that we’re actively taking your feedback into account as we plan out the future of the game."Hopefully sometime soon we’ll hear about timing for some of these updates. In the meantime, check out what IGN’s Ryan Clements had to say about what he’d like to see added to Diablo III