As we near the two week mark since the momentous launch of Diablo 3, the games' designers have taken to the official blog to share their progress and address many of the common criticisms and their desire to be more transparent going forward.

Notably absent is any acknowledgement of the technical server issues that have still been affecting some players on a daily basis, but there is a lot of meat about design decisions to be had here, concluding with the confirmation that they are still going "full steam ahead" on the promised player vs player (PvP) patch and that they will be opening up a Public Test Realm (PTR) for it ahead of its official release.

Here's some interesting stats from the article:

• On average players have created 3 characters each
  
• 80% of characters are between levels 1 and 30
  
• 1.9% of characters have unlocked Inferno difficulty
  
• 54% of Hardcore players chose a female character
  
• The majority of Hardcore deaths (35%) occur in Act I Normal
  
• The most common level 60 build in the game is only used by 0.7% of level 60 characters of that class (not including Passive diversity)
  
• The most used runes for each class at level 60 are Barbarian: Best Served Cold, Demon Hunter: Lingering Fog, Wizard: Mirror Skin, Monk: Peaceful Repose, Witch Doctor: Numbing Dart

The full write-up is a worthwhile read for all Diablo 3 players as it describes their general philosophies on skill balancing, difficulty tweaking, item-scaling and gem and weapon-crafting and offers a vague idea on what kind of things to expect for upcoming hotfixes and client patches.

Havent played the game in a week....

Needs more hardcore pvp.

each of those builds could have 1 rune difference though... so 90% same with a 10% deviation = 0.7%

each of those builds could have 1 rune difference though... so 90% same with a 10% deviation = 0.7%

From anecdotal experience at least into Act1 Inferno lots of guys are running around with all sorts of crazy builds, was with a WD who had zombie dogs in Hell!

Maybe it will homogenise but their goal is for diversity and from my personal gameplay to date its working.

Lowering the cost and amount needed when combining gems? Hear that hog? I wasn't stupid keeping all those gems from flawless upward. I got 437 gems below Flawless Square ready to be combined!

I'm fine with that, knowing you maxxed out the Smith last night >:)

Right now it takes 8m to make 1 lv 14 gem. Thats... crazy. Glad they are reducing the cost and while the nerf to needing 3 gems to make 1 higher quality one isn't really needed, it's welcome. I miss skulls though.

Anyone know when they are going to allow gems on the market?