Blizzard got Hacked

North American accounts are at risk!
Whether you play Diablo 3, WoW, Titan or SC2, you should really change your battle.net / account password.

Even if you're not using the North American servers, it might be a good idea to change your account password. It never hurts to be safe, right? Also, if you didn't already get yourself an authenticator, get one.

The hackers got hold of a whole bunch of email addresses (so expect to receive yet more fake beta invites and account credential requests) as well as a list of account names/passwords. The passwords were stored in an encrypted form - but they "can" be decrypted according to Blizzard. The passwords would have to be decrypted individually though, so it'd take ages for the hackers to try all of them. Even so, if you have a software based authenticator it's recommended you renew the code/seed since those can apparently be used to backtrack a valid key now.
Last but not least, all the "secret question answers" were also stolen (I do so hate that system, since it's not encrypted in any way). You'll need to change those as well - and I would recommend sooner rather than later.

If you were foolish enough to use the same password as your battle.net password - you'll obviously be wanting to change your password on those other sites / games as well.


See the official post at battle.net, or the FAQ they kindly provided for this event.


Diablo 3, state of the game

In other news, Diablo 3's active player base is still steadily declining despite Blizzard's effort to counter this. The overview here on the right shows the number of played hours of users with Xfire. Obviously it's not the 100s of thousands of active players, but it's still showing a very steady decline with some peeks on the weekends.

Would blizzard be worried? Apparently they are as the upcoming 1.0.4 patch seems to nerf monster health in a variety of ways, make champion packs easier, removes enrage timers for champion packs, buffs new legendary items, increases the max damage that item level 61-62 weapons can drop with, and to top it all off they're reviewing some of the "less interesting skills" and claim to buff them where needed.

Boss enrage timers are as of yet untouched.

But, a happy PS: They’re getting rid of the Invulnerable Minions monster affix. /cheer!