Diablo III players who have been waiting for the promised real world auction house to launch will have to keep waiting a bit longer. In a post on the Battle.net web site, Blizzard community manager "Nethaera" said, "In light of the post-launch obstacles we"ve encountered, we have made the decision to move the launch of the real-money auction house beyond the previously estimated May time frame." No new launch date for the feature was announced.
Blizzard has also posted up a list of all of the hotfixes that have been put into Diablo III since its launch on May 15th. Today"s announcement added that Blizzard has plans to take down the game"s servers for more maintenance periods and will also release a client update for Diablo III that will fix a number of bugs and issues.
The update also addressed concerns about reports of Diablo III accounts being hacked into by others. The forum post stated:
First and foremost, we want to make it clear that the Battle.net and Diablo III servers have not been compromised. In addition, the number of Diablo III players who"ve contacted customer service to report a potential compromise of their personal account has been extremely small. 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 post said that, aside from using the Battle.net Authenticator, the best method of securing at Diablo III account is to use "smart password management" along with scanning your PC for malware.