Games

Even the most devoted Diablo III fanatic will probably have a hard time arguing that the game is as compelling once you've reached the level 60 cap and are stuck looking for increasingly rare legendary gear just to get your stat advancement fix. Those late game junkies won't have to suffer through withdrawal much longer, though, as Blizzard has announced a new Paragon system that adds 100 more levels of potential character advancement on top of the current cap.

The silver lining in Thursday's news that hackers extracted significant user information from online gaming empire Blizzard was that passwords were protected by an encryption scheme the company said is "extremely difficult" to crack. We reported that the use of cryptographic "salts" made it "extremely unlikely" that plaintext passwords could be derived from the cryptographic hashes. Security researchers, including those at Sophos and Intego, agreed.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, today informed customers that their internal security network had been breached.

The company doesn't believe that financial information has been compromised but other data including email addresses for all non-China players and scrambled passwords were taken. The company believes it will be extraordinarily difficult for hackers to break into actual accounts, but is recommending that all users change their passwords.

Valve has issued an update to its Steam Subscriber Agreement that effectively prevents all Steam users from joining in class action lawsuits against the company. Valve's new SSA requires that "you [the user] and Valve agree to resolve all disputes and claims... in individual binding arbitration," mimicking similar language added by EA to its Origin service agreement and Microsoft with Windows 8.

Game developer Ubisoft is advising customers to update their systems following the discovery of a high-profile security vulnerability in the company's Uplay games tool.

Researcher Tavis Ormandy first spotted the flaw, which could potentially allow a third-party to exploit the uPlay service to run arbitrary and potentially malicious applications.

A Diablo 3 God mode exploit for the Barbarian class has been discovered. The bug's been found only a day after users found and abused a similar bug that made Wizards completely invulnerable. The Wizard God-mode exploit took Blizzard almost an entire day to fix, and players were even live streaming their experiences of taking out some of the hardest content the game had to offer without even breaking a sweat, or the bank, for once.

Hackers have posted more than 8 million passwords and email addresses obtained from Gamigo, a free gaming site based out of Germany.

Gamigo was initially hacked in March. At the time, the site required all registered users to create new passwords. Hackers posted the personal information earlier this month on a password-cracking forum called Insider Pro, according to Forbes.

Now before we begin on this news bit, we understand that the exploit has been around for more than a day. With an unscheduled maintenance already taken place over the last few hours and with many facing horrible lag to the server at this moment, the reason for all this is due to Blizzard trying to fix a seemingly simple exploit that allows hackers to buy items on the Auction House for almost next to nothing.

The concept to the exploit is quite simply grandma-nodding-simple; buying an item at its bidding price instead of the buyout price.

Had a rough time playing Minecraft today? There's a reason why.

A security flaw in Minecraft that allowed users to sign into strangers' accounts was exposed by security researchers Alex Vanderport and Keegan Novik when the Team Avolition duo posted a detailed advisory about the snafu on GitHub Saturday. The game's maker, Mojang, has promised the flaw is fixed.

If you surveyed the video game industry just after E3 2010, you'd think stereoscopic 3D had finally reached a tipping point and was on the cusp of becoming a new gaming standard. Sony made everyone attending its E3 press conference that year wear 3D glasses to check out big-screen trailers for titles like Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5, Nintendo unleashed an army of booth babes at its own press conference to show off the glasses-free 3D of its Nintendo 3DS for the first time, and NVIDIA continued to push its all-in-one 3D Vision system, launched the year before.