Blizzard CEO Addresses The Diablo 3 Fan Community
Posted 2 days ago - By
Adam Rosenberg
It's been a bumpy road for
Diablo 3 so far in spite of its successful launch, and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime took a moment today to address the game's fan community with a lengthy message posted on the
Battle.net forums. He comments on roughly every chapter so far in the ongoing
Diablo 3 story, from the
post-launch issues with error messages to the rationale behind the
real-money auction house to the
planned changes in future updates.
There are a few noteworthy items of interest here. Morhaime mentions the upcoming patch v1.0.4, which will add "new and improved Legendary items" that he describes as "more interesting, more powerful, and more epic in ways you probably won't be expecting." Improvements to social interactions and the auction house are also promised for patch v1.1, as well as the recently teased plans for a
more elaborate set of goals to reach for in the endgame.
Interestingly, Morhaime completely ignores the recent rash of bannings related to some players' use of Linux/Wine to run
Diablo 3. Blizzard claims that the bannings all stem from verified incidents of cheating, but a sizable portion of the fan community (or a vocal one, at any rate) has stepped up to insist that Blizzard's testing process produces false positives.
Given how deeply Morhaime's post dives into the various post-launch talking points for
Diablo 3, the absence of any discussion of the recent bannings is surprising. That absence also could be read as a message in and of itself: Blizzard's anti-cheating protocols are sacred, and the notification email sent out with each banning is, as it says, the final word on the matter.
The non-address of the issue in Morhaime's post is definitely at odds with the studio's "Every Voice Matters" philosophy that he lays out at the start. It'll be interesting to see how the community responds to that and the rest of Morhaime's statements in the coming days.