The launch of the decade-long-awaited "Diablo 3" has been bedeviled by a variety of issues, but the people behind the action role-playing game say they have been busy fixing it and will continue to make more fixes in the coming weeks.
With gamers complaining of being unable to access overloaded servers, of achievements gone missing and of gold stolen from hacked accounts, Blizzard has posted a lengthy message to players on its Battle.net forums explaining that it has been "working around the clock to address issues as quickly and efficiently as possible."
Since the game's launch, we’ve applied a number of hotfixes to address gameplay issues, made tweaks to improve our service stability and performed occasional server maintenance when necessary to ensure that in the long term, players have the best gameplay experience possible.
The message goes on to say that more server maintenance is still required and that Blizzard will be updating the game with a patch "sometime next week" to address additional issues and bugs.
While Blizzard says it is still trying to figure out how to address the issue of achievements that went missing as gamers played during the first days after launch, it doesn't sound like there's much to be done about the hacked accounts.
Despite some players speculating otherwise, Blizzard insists that its servers have not been compromised and says that the number of players reporting hacked accounts is "extremely small." The company goes on to explain:
In all of the individual Diablo III-related compromise cases we've investigated, none have occurred after a physical Battle.net Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator app was attached to the player's account, and we have yet to find any situation where a Diablo III player's account was accessed outside of "traditional" compromise methods (i.e. someone logging using an account's login email and password) ...
The best defense against account theft still includes smart password management (e.g. using a unique password for every site/service and keeping your password to yourself) and scanning for malware and viruses regularly, as well as following additional preventative steps found here.
And in a final bit of news, Blizzard said that it has pushed back the launch of its real-money auction house (a place gamers will be able to use real money to to buy and sell virtual "Diablo 3" items) indefinitely.
All of the troubles aside, "Diablo 3" is still selling at a record-breaking pace. And the game continues to rake in high marks from reviewers. Here's what our own In-Game editor Todd Kenreck thought about it:
Winda Benedetti writes about games for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things here on Twitter or join her in the stream here on Google+. And for more video game news and reviews be sure to check out the In-Game Facebook page right here.