Exploit in Diablo III causes Wizards to become invincible

The Diablo 3 Battle.net forums are abuzz with talks of a new exploit that allows Wizard players to become completely invincible. Blizzard is no doubt trying to rush out a patch that will fix this exploit. This has proven the game to be more about maxing out your character’s invisible numbers than having fun killing armies of ghouls and skeletons.

Diablo 3 is a great game, easily one of the best games to come out this year, despite Blizzard’s apparent attempts at making everyone hate the game. Someone with an exploit giving them power as incredible as invincibility could easily beat out the toughest parts of the game, get the best possible gear and exploit the economy of Blizzard’s controversial Real Money Auction House.

Invincibility can be achieved by casting certain spells in a certain order. The exact information would be unethical to reveal. Blizzard has also started censoring posts on the Diablo III forums that reveal the exploit.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

This is just one in the long list of controversies surrounding Blizzard and Diablo III. Long before the game came out, Blizzard made the unpopular decision to necessitate a constant Internet connection to play the game - even when in single player mode. The still controversial Real Money Auction House is theorized to be one of the main reasons for the ‘always online’ requirement that has even been criticized by other game developers.

Her? Invincible? Run for your lives!

Though, recently Blizzard has admitted that the real point of the always online requirement wasn’t to keep their precious Real Money Auction House economy safe, since that hardly seems to be working. Instead, the real reason for the always online requirement was in the form of digital rights management  (DRM).

Even during launch day, many players were left locked out of their games due to the infamous Error 37, which meant that the login servers were overloaded. The real question to be asked was - why does someone need to login to some server to play the game single player?

Last year, IGN had asked Rob Pardo, executive producer of Diablo III about this DRM and he says it was implemented to prevent cheating. Here’s his explanation, “In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I think the intuition for a lot of people when they’re playing the game is ‘I want to make my character offline away from that scary battle net environment. And then once I have this powerful character, I’ll jump online.’ But the problem with that concept is we can’t really detect if they’re cheating. They might have the capability to hack their character and things like that, so at that point we can’t really allow that character to be in the battle net environment. Then they’re going to have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate.”