The auction house has been the most consistently-criticized element of Diablo 3. Many players feel the hack-and-slasher has been balanced around throwing you a bunch of gear you don’t need or want, so you’ll sell it to players who do and hand-pick your upgrades from a spreadsheet. This process isn’t as fun as getting the gear you want from the half-exploded corpse of a demon. Blizzard agrees that this is an issue, stating in a massive community Q&A on the official forums that it’s something they’re addressing.

“Something we discuss frequently is how the Auction House has impacted the game and how we can refocus players away from farming the Auction House and onto farming monsters,” Game Designer Travis Day wrote. Working toward that goal, today’s 1.0.7 patch introduces a new crafting system that utilizes a new resource: Demonic Essence. The DE craftables will be account-bound, removing them from the auction house economy.

“Demonic Essence was made account bound to encourage players who wish to create the new items to play the game instead of simply going to the Auction House and buying all the mats necessary to mass produce the items,” Day continues. “For that same reason we wanted the product of the recipes to be account bound as well. We want players to not only find or produce their own items more often but also diminish the impact the Auction House has on the game, and we felt like this was a good opportunity to take our first steps in that direction.”

“Something we discuss frequently is how the Auction House has impacted the game and how we can refocus players away from farming the Auction House and onto farming monsters,” Game Designer Travis Day wrote. Working toward that goal, today’s 1.0.7 patch introduces a new crafting system that utilizes a new resource: Demonic Essence. The DE craftables will be account-bound, removing them from the auction house economy. 

If you’ve lost a character to permadeath in a game like Dungeons of Dredmor or DayZ, you’ve felt the confluence of mourning and guilt that follows. But some Diablo 3 players couldn’t deal with that grief, apparently, and resorted to faking account compromises in order to get Blizzard to roll their accounts back, resurrecting recently-slain Hardcore mode characters in the process. Who are we to judge how others cope with loss?

Blizzard, understandably, plans to close this loophole by making changes to the way account rollbacks work in the upcoming 1.0.7 patch for Diablo 3.

“Hardcore characters were never intended to be revived or undeleted by an account rollback,” a community post on the official forums stated. “Bringing Hardcore characters back to life via rollback really isn’t in the spirit of Hardcore (where death is permanent, no matter the circumstances); however, when we originally adapted our rollback services for Diablo III, we didn’t have the technology to make Hardcore characters exempt.”

If you’ve lost a character to permadeath in a game like Dungeons of Dredmor or DayZ, you’ve felt the confluence of mourning and guilt that follows. But some Diablo 3 players couldn’t deal with that grief, apparently, and resorted to faking account compromises in order to get Blizzard to roll their accounts back, resurrecting recently-slain Hardcore mode characters in the process. Who are we to judge how others cope with loss? 

I wonder how many people there are still playing Diablo 3. And I wonder how many people there are who haven’t played it for ages, but fancy getting back into it. As persuading factors go, the ability to drop a meteor on your co-op partners’ heads might just tip some over the edge. Player vs. player dueling will be added in patch 1.0.7, detailed in a new post on the Diablo 3 site.

The patch is due to hit the Public Test Realm shortly. It’ll add a dueling arena called the Scorched Chapel, a new tier of gems for high level players, ability balances for the Monk and the Wizard, and a few “quality of life” changes, including the removal of incrementally increasing respawn timers in non-hardcore play. Woohoo.

The Scorched Chapel will be accessible via Nek The Brawler in the New Tristram Bar. The Chapel has four areas: “the church, the graveyard, the river, and the lake.” Up to four players can participate in free-for-all brawls. As previously mentioned, team deathmatch has been shelved.

Blizzard say “our intent is to provide players a safe, opt-in location where they can fight one another for bragging rights (or maybe science) without the potential for griefing as it existed in Diablo II.”

There won’t be any score-keeping or achievements, and Blizzard admit that “Some matchups may be one-sided, and we don’t expect that battles will be necessarily balanced,” but “we know that even without rewards and objectives, some players just want to beat each other up.”

The patch will also add new crafting recipes for account-bound items like the Infernal Machine’s Hellfire Ring reward. These rare recipes will let players craft new gloves, pants, wrists, a chest piece and an amulet. For full details, and more on the precise balance and XP tweaks, check out the patch post on Battle.net.