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.