14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Blizzard announces that it is getting ready to wipe the leaderboard of the Public test Realm for Diablo 3 at some point before the end of the day in order to deal with a major bug that has been allowing gamers to create Greater Rifts below level 70.
The official announcement from the company explains that, "There will be a short interruption of service as we apply a hotfix to remove the ability to create less than level 70 Greater Rifts and clear out the Leaderboard data. This downtime should last no longer than 30 minutes. Please note that there may be an increase in game queues during this time."
Blizzard adds, "Since these changes are being applied via a hotfix, players who attempt to open a Greater Rift in a game that is less than level 70 will not receive a validation error and may be disconnected from the game if they continue attempting to open such Rifts."
The studio is also thanking all gamers for putting in the time and effort required to take part in the Public Test Realm for Diablo 3 and promises that it is planning to deal with all the issues that the community has been signaling on the forums and using other types of feedback.
At the moment, the testing area of the game is more crowded than usual because gamers are eager to get hands-on time with the upcoming patch 2.1.0, which is designed to introduce a variety of major changes to the title.
Blizzard has given the community full details about the changes and has suggested that it will use the Public Test Realm to make sure that there are no bugs that manage to slip into the full public release in order to cause problems with the wider community.
Once Diablo 3 gets updated, players will be able to compete in the new Season mode, which will ask gamers to pick new characters and then complete a variety of achievements called Conquests, with an entirely new set of leaderboards and special items offered as rewards.
The Greater Rift is another new feature for the game and can only be opened using a number of keys that are taken from Nephalem guardians.
Gamers who complete one of them will progress in level, find out tougher enemies to battle and interesting rewards and their performance will be tracked using another set of leaderboards.