Today's 0.11.0d Patch and the upcoming 0.11.1 Patch

I was speaking with a recently banned player today and he commented that he had no idea that we ban people for abusing exploits such as instance crashes/rollbacks. We do. If you stumble upon an exploit like that, please report it to us. It's easy for us to create a list of who abused an exploit, eradicate the items they gained from it and permanently ban them. We don't discuss it often, but we ban thousands of accounts per week - generally for attempting to run bots or for spamming RMT links in chat.

By the way, in case you're currently waiting for a reply from our customer support department, please be aware they still have a big backlog of mails to process. We have been adding staff to the roster and automating some processes in an attempt to get through the backlog more quickly. Thanks very much for your patience. We'll be replying to every mail - there's no need to send "bump" as a message :P

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GFValkyria wrote:

"Today's 0.10.0d"

Time jump!

Nice, you caught that just before I irreversibly hit "Post" on facebook.

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

Will that also include 3D art seen outside of the inventory? That is key.

Yes, and it's amazing. Honestly, most of them are as awesome as the microtransaction helmets we sell.

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lagwin1980 wrote:

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Jadran wrote:

Um, I hope by "instance rollbacks" you don't mean Ctrl+clicking on the entrance / waypoint to create a new instance to refarm it... Otherwise I'm content I don't know what you're talking about :)

i think he means that by crashing the instance and rolling back drops and what not, possibly item duping or using it to repeatedly ID and item to gain the desired stats or roll on currency

Yeah, it's possible to apply currency items multiple times with a server crash. It's rare that they make their way onto the live realm (search the patch notes for "instance crash" or "server crash") and we generally fix them a few hours after they first happen, but sometimes someone makes an effort to abuse one and we have to do cleanup. This has only happened twice during Open Beta, I think, and I'm pretty sure no items made it out to the economy.

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Yendis wrote:

What exactly do you mean by 'the way damage is calculated'.
Does this imply a change to the way our armor interacts with monster damage. Or is it our damage vs monsters that's affected?

It's an internal change that won't have much effect on what users see, but does allow us to do a lot more complex stuff in the future (many new unique items are possible now, for example). Mark can talk at length about the other benefits the change has.

We'll come up with a more complete list of changes for that patch soon.

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Crevox wrote:

What happened to new skill gems? I thought we were getting "1 per week" as a goal, and now it's been month(s) since we've seen one.

Three things:
a) One per week was crushing us and preventing work on larger-scale changes.
b) After adding the big pile that we added, we wanted to take some time to plan out the next ones so that they're really good skills.
c) More are coming soon!

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Sobeck wrote:

is this "equip covenant(bloodmagic)+cast aura+reequip normal chestplate" an exploit too?

We are not banning for this but we want to fix it.

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entropus wrote:

Secondly, uniques like Covenant and Simula are good for nothing except for using that mechanic.

I don't know about the Simula, but my current character on Onslaught is built around wearing the Covenant armor permanently. So don't make blanket statements like that. Not to mention the Covenant is a diamond unique and I'm sure the person who designed it did not intend for it to be useful for nothing but this.

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tmaciak wrote:

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Hrishi wrote:

Not to mention the Covenant is a diamond unique and I'm sure the person who designed it did not intend for it to be useful for nothing but this.

Unfortunately, majority of current uniqes have such niche usage, that can be classified as unusable for majority of players (those are my raising "unique for 1 alchemy" pile). If you are planning to use Covenant in some of HC league, I only can to wish you good luck, but I don't expect long and fruitful career of your character.

Perhaps my character won't have a long and fruitful career. I will never know till I try. But that is not the point, making unique builds around uniques is one of the major drawing points of this game. While I don't deny that the majority of the population might find the unique useless, do understand that every unique (other than a couple I suppose) has some form of use in some kind of niche build. After all, isn't that what most uniques are for?

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tmaciak wrote:

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Hrishi wrote:

While I don't deny that the majority of the population might find the unique useless, do understand that every unique (other than a couple I suppose) has some form of use in some kind of niche build. After all, isn't that what most uniques are for?

In general, I agree but I also think that "mandatory drawback" is in some cases exaggerated and Coventant is good example - BM and reduced life...

Remember that the Covenant is only -20% reduced life, not less life! So it basically negates about 3 passive nodes of HP. The drawback isn't as big as some people seem to think.