One year ago this week, we launched Diablo III in over 10 languages and 30 countries around the world. Since then, we've made significant improvements to the game, shipping upwards of 15 patches and implementing numerous hotfixes to make your battle against the forces of the Burning Hells that much more epic.

In celebration of Diablo III's anniversary, we wanted to take a look at the road so far -- recapping some of the major changes made to the game since release and providing players quick access to all the latest updates.
(If you haven't played in a while or are new to the realm of Sanctuary, definitely stay a while and listen.)

- PARAGON LEVELS -

When a hero reaches level 60, experience earned from quests, monsters, and massacre bonuses will begin to count toward Paragon levels. There are 100 Paragon levels in total, and each level will reward players with a permanent bonus to Gold Find and Magic Find, as well as core stat increases (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality). For every 10 Paragon levels, players will also earn a new hero portrait border which will display in the in-game party frame. This border will not only become more impressive as you level up, it will also display your Paragon level in any place where your normal hero level is shown.

For more information on Paragon levels, click here or check out the game guide.

- INFERNAL MACHINE -

The Infernal Machine is a device that will allow level 60 players to battle "uber" versions of some of Sanctuary’s most nefarious bosses. While the rewards for defeating these bosses will be great, some assembly is required. Only the most powerful Nephalem can unlock the secrets to building the Infernal Machine,  but once forged the device can be used to open portals to special encounters featuring not one, but two bosses which have been augmented from their original versions, both in terms of difficulty and appearance. Defeating each boss pair will provide players with extra items and gold, as well as a chance to find components for a new Legendary: the Hellfire Ring!

For more information about the Infernal Machine event, click here or check out the game guide.

- LEGENDARY ITEM IMPROVEMENTS -

In patch 1.0.4, we made significant changes to Legendary items to make them more powerful, more memorable, and ultimately more fun to use. Through the addition of spell procs, many Legendary items now have a chance to activate rare and unique abilities, such as summoning an angel to fight with you, conjuring an icy projectile, or igniting the very ground you walk on. Legendary items are also far and away more powerful, possessing higher damage and affix values than their predecessors. In addition, many Legendary items have had visual effects added to their original models, giving them a distinct and detailed flair.



For more information about these improvements, click here.

- BRAWLING -

For those who wish to test their mettle against fellow Nephalem, head on over to the Scorched Chapel! This zone can be accessed by speaking with Nek the Brawler in any of the four Act hubs, and supports 2 to 4 players in a Free-For-All format.

For more information about Brawling, click here or check out the game guide.

- MONSTER POWER -

Similar to the "Players X" command in Diablo II, Monster Power is a system designed to give players more control over how challenging enemies are in each difficulty. With this system, players can choose to increase the health and damage of monsters according to different "power levels" and in return they'll receive scaling bonuses to experience as well as boosts to Magic Find and Gold Find which will stack above the 300% cap. The option to increase Monster Power is available to all players starting at level 1 in the Quest Selection window, and can be adjusted separately for Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties.

For more information about Monster Power, click here or check out the game guide.

- MULTIPLAYER IMPROVEMENTS -

In patch 1.0.8, we made several improvements to the multiplayer experience in Diablo III, including a special bonus for multiplayer games that grants +10%  Magic Find, Gold Find, and Experience for each additional player in the party, combat alerts for whenever a player is engaged with an Elite monster or treasure goblin, multi-user conversations (a new chat option that allows players to chat privately with up to 98 of their friends), and matchmaking tags for Public Games.

These changes focused on buffing existing social features, making it easier for players to find one another online, and providing bonuses when playing in our cooperative mode.

For more information about these improvements, click here.

- MONSTER DENSITY -

More demons, more fun! As of patch 1.0.8,  players in Inferno difficulty at Monster Power 1 and higher will find an increased number of enemies across Acts I, II, and IV. By adjusting density in these areas, all four Acts should now be more comparable in terms of difficulty vs. reward, giving players more options for farming (and more monsters on which to enact their revenge).

For more information, click here.

- OFFICIAL PATCH NOTES -

But that's not all! Be sure to check out our official patch notes for updates to Diablo III in all their gory details.

Looking for more retrospectives? Head on over to Diablo Fans and Diablo Somepage for their 2012/2013 recaps!

Hey everyone,

I'm John Hight, the production director for Diablo III. As most of you know, after the release of patch 1.0.8 a small number of players exploited a bug to duplicate gold. The bug has since been fixed, and the Auction Houses and gold trading are back online.

While the issue is resolved, we know a lot of players have questions about what happened and what we're doing about it, so I wanted to take some time to discuss the details with you here.

So, What Happened?

Shortly after we released patch 1.0.8 in the Americas on Tuesday, players discovered a bug that allowed gold to be duplicated via the real-money Auction House. The bug was the result of a coding error that was exposed when we increased the gold stack size from 1 million to 10 million. This resulted in an overflow on cancelled auctions that yielded a greater amount of gold in return. Only a relatively small number of players had the billions of gold necessary to exploit the bug, and only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain.

To all of you who reported this to us, thank you! As soon as we confirmed what was happening, we took the Auction Houses in the Americas offline and suspended gold trading in order to isolate the problem. From there, we were able to troubleshoot, develop a fix, test it, and deploy it to all regions before the day ended—also ensuring that patch 1.0.8 rolled out in other regions (without the bug) as scheduled. The Auction Houses remained offline and gold trades remained suspended until we completed a full audit of all transactions that occurred during this period. Once that was completed, we brought everything back online.

While this was happening, we locked accounts that appeared to be exploiting the bug as well as collaborators that held gold or items for the exploiters. Once we confirmed that an account was involved in this exploit, we either banned or rolled back the account depending on their activity.

What Does That Mean for Me?

Soon after the exploit was discovered, we contemplated doing a complete rollback, as was suggested by a number of players here in the forums.

The vast majority of players did not participate in the exploit and we didn't like the idea of punishing them for the bad behavior of a few people. A rollback would mean bringing the servers down for a lengthy period and a loss of all progression since 1.0.8 was released. Many players made significant accomplishments in the game that required time and dedication, and we felt it was worth the work involved to try to preserve these efforts and go after the exploiters instead.

With this in mind, we elected not to roll back the servers in The Americas and are instead working to remove duplicated gold from the economy through targeted audits and account actions (as indicated above) without taking away progress that our players rightfully earned.

As of this this post, we have already recaptured more than 85% of the excess gold from the accounts involved, and over the days ahead we will continue to pore over our audit data to reclaim as much duplicate currency as possible. We've also done a full audit of our code to help make sure that something like this doesn't happen again.

So, What's Next?

Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We're making sure that all legitimate transactions go through. This means that if your account was not involved in the exploit, you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House. We'll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players—including all of THEIR sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee—to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

Thank You!

On behalf of the development team, I just want to say thanks again to those of you who took the time to notify us about this situation, as well as apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you personally. We highly value fair play, and we’re going to continue to monitor the game and take steps necessary to prevent exploits like this from happening in the future.
Items

• Justice Heirloom vendors now have Heirloom shields in stock.
• Kirin Tor and Sunreaver Beacons are now usable from inside the Throne of Thunder.

UI
Dungeon Journal has been reorganized. The model view has moved int