Diablo 3 Auction House Delayed Again, New Patch Coming

The Diablo 3 real-money auction house has been, once again, delayed. Although the auction house has been working with in-game currency since the game’s launch, Blizzard took it down earlier this week to address some unspecified issues. At the time of this article, the auction house is functioning to some capacity, but commodity auctions have been taken down.

At the game’s launch, Blizzard announced that it would be delaying the real-money auction house’s launch until the end of May, probably because it was busy dealing with a host of server issues that cropped up. Now that we’re here down to the last week and a half of May, Blizzard states that the real-money auction house no longer has a release date. Hopefully, this doesn’t mean that Blizzard doesn’t plan on seeing the real-money auction house to fruition for another half a year.

Blizzard also expects to launch a client side patch next week to “further address client issues and apply additional bug fixes.” Perhaps the nefarious achievements issue, where players aren’t receiving certain achievements as they should be due to server problems.

Blizzard’s also published a list of hotfixes that have been applied to the game since its launch. The list is actually impressively long and includes the Monk and Demon Hunter nerfs that were released just a few days ago. The list is as follows (and may contain spoilers, for those who've yet to finish the game):

Monsters:

• Mehtan the Necromancer and his skeletons can no longer be used to kill other monsters which have been kited to their location before or after the "Restless Sands" event.

General:

• Players will now receive an error message when attempting to remove a gem from an item with no sockets (rather than disconnecting).
• Players will now properly have their casting interrupted when attacked while performing resurrect on a fallen group member.
• Resolved over 30 game and service crashes affecting players.

Classes:

• Demon Hunter:
• Active Skills:
• Smoke Screen: Duration reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second (tooltip will still show 2 seconds).
• Skill Rune - Lingering Fog: Now increases the duration of Smoke Screen to 1.5 seconds (tooltip will still show 3 seconds).
• Monk:
• Active Skills:
• Fists of Thunder: Skill Rune - Quickening. Fixed an issue that was causing spirit regeneration to incorrectly trigger off critical hits from other sources, such as Sweeping Wind.
• Mantra of Healing: Mantra of Healing will now correctly provide only two times the base healing effect for the first 3 seconds after activation, down from four times the base healing effect (tooltip will still show the old value).
• Skill Rune - Boon of Protection. A maximum absorption amount has been set to 1000 Life.  This skill will be redesigned in an upcoming patch.
• Wizard:
• Active Skills:
• Arcane Torrent: Skill Rune - Cascade. Fixed an issue that was causing Arcane Torrent to fire 3 new missiles per kill instead of only 1 new missile per kill. Number of simultaneously missiles generated from this rune will now cap at 10 missiles.
• Energy Armor: Skill Rune - Force Armor. Amount of damage absorbed from a single attack will now cap at 100% of a player's maximum Life.

Items:

• The chest spawn in the Town Cellar in Alcanus has been changed from a 100% chance to spawn a Resplendant chest to a 50% chance to spawn a Normal chest.
• Players can no longer dual-wield two-handed weapons.

Classes:

• Monk:
• Active Skills:
• Serenity: Skill Rune - Tranquility. Duration of immunity granted to nearby allies from crowd control effects reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second.

Encounters:

• Players will no longer remain invulnerable to attacks after defeating Diablo.
• Players can no longer become stuck during Diablo's Shadow Grab ability if a player blinds Diablo while Shadow Grab is being cast.

Items:

• Equipping a shield on a follower as a demon hunter will no longer disconnect you from the game.

Quests:

• Act I: Players can now always interact with Karyna during the quest and quest step "Trailing the Coven : Talk to Karyna" when they resume from a save.
• Act II: The Enchantress will now always appear during the quest and quest step "Shadows in the Desert : Disrupt the Hidden Conclave."
• Act IV: Tyrael will now always be present for the in-game cutscene during the quest and quest step "Prime Evil : Climb to the Pinnacle of Heaven in the Silver Spire."