Tonight, the Auction House was reinstated following a message from the director of product over at Blizzard that detailed the issues/fallout of the gold duping. Essentially, he summarized the actual bug and how Blizzard proceeded to correct the issue, their decision not to rollback the patch and even some stats on the percentage of people exploiting the bug. Essentially, considering the general population for Diablo 3, the actual number of people dealing with the situation was quite small, since in order to perform the exploit, you pretty much needed a huge amount of gold. Naturally, the vast majority of us would even see the exploit so it pretty much alludes to a key problem in the game.
What it seems like is that the exploit was being done through high end gamers. Obviously, some streamers, who are high end with tremendous amounts of gold, did bring up the bug during their live streams. But it feels as though the ones who were dealing with this probably are the same people who flip on the auction house and possibly even use bots to achieve their wealth. In short, most of the people, imo, are unethical (after all, these people were the ones exploiting the bug for even more gain)
One of the unfortunate consequences resulting from the banning of accounts and resetting of the Auction House was that a lot of items ended up becoming account bound. Certainly, there are players who applaud this decision, but the net effect is that most of the items probably were high end items. When I checked the Auction House earlier, it felt somewhat empty compared to normal. So it’s possible that the slightly more affordable items ended up having their prices raised to meet the new demand. Unfortunately, the mediocre items probably stayed the same.
Beyond that, I started testing different Monster Power levels and checking out a few Act 1 areas in trying to find a good zone to farm. Right now, the popular zone has become the Weeping Hollow since most monsters there aren’t as difficult compared to other dense zones. I found that my Witch Doctor when he’s suited up can handle Monster Power 4 in that area just fine, but moving past that point is pretty rough.
However, since I was a bit bored, I ended up playing my Wizard a bit, changing her spec back to Critical Mass and picking up the Chantodo’s Will and Force combo, while handing my Witch Doctor’s gear to her on loan. The neat thing about moving back to Critical Mass with this gear is that I’m able to handle Monster Power 5 fairly well. I did die once or twice but I could start seeing the Critical Mass build shine. I gave a few of the Act 1 areas a go using this build. Right now, it feels that repeating the Weeping Hollow might be the best spot for farming, at least for Paragon Leveling. I might try pumping up the Monster Power a few more times to see where the sweet spot for farming is. But the nice thing about doing this is the large amount of experience.
I might eventually go back to Archon just because I find the Critical Mass build to be pretty intense and harsh on my fingers and wrists. Also, it’s just REALLY slow to farm these areas. But I’m just seeing how much I can handle. It would be nice to try Monster Power 10 down the road since the rest of my guys really can’t handle that level. But I don’t anticipate it to be all that fun considering how it’s really harsh on my wrist.