As the months went by, everyone at Blizzard felt ecstatic about the progress they were making. Since Error 37, they’d changed Diablo III’s formula, overhauled the loot system, and thought they could win back millions of players with Reaper of Souls. But Mosqueira still felt like the game had a critical flaw that they had yet to address, something that seemed at odds with how they wanted people to play the game: the auction house.

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When Blizzard first announced Diablo III’s real-money auction house, cynics saw it as a cash grab. After all, Blizzard got to take a healthy cut every time a player sold an item for cash. Blizzard’s developers argued that they had more noble motives, insisting that they’d built the auction house to improve the experience of trading items for players. Back in 2002, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction had become infested with third-party gray markets, in which people would trade real money for powerful items on sketchy, insecure websites. Blizzard’s goal was, as Kevin Martens put it, to provide “a world-class experience” for those players, one that was safe and secure.

Not long after Diablo III’s launch, however, it became apparent to Blizzard that the auction house was hurting the game. Some players enjoyed trading, sure—especially the ones who were farming loot and selling it for a healthy profit—but for many, the auction house made Diablo III a significantly worse experience. It reduced the thrill of hunting for gear. What was the fun in getting a great roll on a cool new piece of armor if you could just hop on the market and buy a better one?

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One group of players, who called themselves the Ironborn (after Game of Thrones’ House Greyjoy), made a point of refusing to use the auction house. They even sent petitions to Blizzard asking if the developers would consider adding an Ironborn mode to Diablo III. “This was a community of players who were saying, ‘Hey guys, Diablo III is the exact same game, but I’m having this whole new experience choosing to play it without the auction house,’” said Wyatt Cheng. “You can look at Diablo through that lens and say, you know what, we’ve got this really amazing game, but the auction house is having this distorting effect on how some people might perceive it.”

One day in September 2013, as Reaper of Souls was in full production, Josh Mosqueira sat in a meeting, doodling in a notebook. It was one of Blizzard’s routine monthly strategy meetings, at which CEO Mike Morhaime would get together with company executives and project leads to talk about the business, and much of the technical finance talk was bouncing off Mosqueira. Then the conversation turned to Diablo III, and suddenly they were talking about the auction house.

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“[Mike] said, ‘Well what do you think?’” said Mosqueira. “If I was anywhere else, I probably would’ve said, ‘You know what, I think we still need to figure things out,’ or ‘I’m not quite sure.’ But looking at those guys, and knowing how important having our players have faith in us was, I said, ‘You know what, guys? Maybe we should just kill it.’”

After some brief discussions about how the logistics might work—How would they communicate it to players? What would they do with current auctions? How long would they need to wait?—the decision crystallized. It was time for Diablo III’s auction house to die. “I was [thinking], ‘Wow, this is happening,’” said Mosqueira. “I think to Mike’s credit, Mike’s a huge gamer. He loves the games. He loves players more than anything else. And he’s just willing to make those decisions, and say, ‘You know, this is going to hurt. But it’s the right thing to do.’”

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On September 17, 2013, Blizzard announced that it would shut down the auction house in March 2014. Fans were, for the most part, thrilled by the news. Now you’d be able to go hunt for loot in Diablo III without the nagging feeling that you could just pay money for something better. Wrote one Kotaku commenter: “Good job Blizzard, you’ve actually restored some faith in me. I may actually play this again.”

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Diablo is best experienced when, as a result of slaying monsters, you get better items that allow you to make your character more powerful,” said Wyatt Cheng. “And if the activity that I do to make my character more powerful does not include killing monsters . . . then that’s not a good place to be.”

Now it felt like they’d found the perfect formula for Reaper of Souls. In addition to the new area (Westmarch), and boss (Malthael), the expansion would come with Loot 2.0 (free to all players via patch), Adventure Mode, and an overhauled difficulty system. The week before Reaper of Souls, Blizzard would remove the auction house. As they finalized the development of the expansion and prepared for launch, Mosqueira and his team felt like this was the big moment. They were going to win people back.

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When Reaper of Souls launched on March 25, 2014, there was no Error 37. Blizzard had bolstered its infrastructure this time around. Plus, the company had decided to improve the error messaging system so that even if something went awry, the warning wouldn’t be so vague. “I think one of the other lessons that we learned is if you were there, anxious, and you logged in, and you got Error 37, you [thought], ‘What is Error 37? I have no idea what this is,’” said Josh Mosqueira. “Now, all the error messages are more descriptive. They say, ‘This is the problem we’re having. Here’s a time frame where you can expect this problem to be fixed.’”

As they watched the reactions pour in, Blizzard’s staff collectively breathed a sigh of relief. So did Diablo players. “Diablo III has finally rediscovered the moment-to-moment gameplay that made the series great,” wrote a reviewer for Ars Technica, “and fixed—or removed—almost everything that got in the way of that greatness. Reaper of Souls is the redemption of Diablo III.”

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Two years after launch, people were finally falling in love with Diablo III. “When you went to the forums, or when you started getting feedback directly from fans, the issues they were complaining about were more specific and less broad,” said Kevin Martens. “That was when I really thought, ‘OK we’re finally getting there.’” As Martens and other designers browsed through Reddit or Battle.net, they were encouraged to see players complaining about underpowered items or asking Blizzard to buff specific builds. No longer were people offering the three words of feedback that serve as a death warrant for any game: “This isn’t fun.”

What was most gratifying for Josh Mosqueira was that people especially loved the console version of Diablo III, which launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013 and on the newer consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) in August 2014. After decades of clicking, many gamers almost felt sacrilegious saying so, but playing Diablo III was more fun with a PlayStation 4 controller than it ever had been with a mouse and keyboard.

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In the coming months and years, Blizzard would go on to release more patches and features for Diablo III. Some were free, like a dungeon called Greyhollow Island and a revamped version of the cathedral from the first Diablo game. Others cost money, like the necromancer character class. Although fans lamented the absence of another big expansion pack (which, as of early 2017, hadn’t happened), it was clear that Blizzard had committed to supporting Diablo III for years after its release. Other developers might not have bothered—especially after the launch day catastrophe. “Mike Morhaime, the president of the company, said to us, ‘We want to win and earn the love and trust of our players,’” said Wyatt Cheng. “We had all this work we had done in this game. We believed in the game. We knew it was great, and it would’ve been so tragic, I think, if we were at a company that said, ‘Oh, Error 37, pull the plug.’”

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Josh Mosqueira, on the other hand, was done with Diablo III. In the summer of 2016, Mosqueira left Blizzard, joining Rob Pardo, a veteran Blizzard executive and the lead designer of World of Warcraft, to form a new studio called Bonfire. “Leaving this team and this company was the hardest non–life threatening decision I’ve ever had to make,” Mosqueira said. “I felt that I wanted to take a chance and try to do something totally different.”

At least he’d left Blizzard with something great. Diablo III was one of the best-selling video games in history, having sold thirty million copies as of August 2015. It also proved a point that would influence numerous game developers in the years to come, including but not limited to the makers of The Division and Destiny (whom we’ll meet in chapter 8): every game can be fixed.

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Often, the developers of a video game hit their stride toward the end of a project, when they learn what their game really feels like to play. For Diablo III and games like it, launching was just the beginning of the development process. “Even with a game that has a really strong vision, a really strong identity like Diablo,” said Mosqueira, “I think one of the challenges is that at the beginning of a project . . . before a game comes out, everybody has a slightly different version of the game in their head. One of the hardest things to do is get it out. But once it’s out, there’s less discussion about that because you can now [see] what it is. Game development’s really hard, but it’s a different type of hard before it’s released. It’s more existential before it’s released.”

Diablo III was proof that, even for one of the most accomplished and talented game studios in the world, with near-limitless resources to make a game, years can pass before that game properly coalesces. That even for the third game in a franchise, there are still an impossible number of variables that can throw everyone off. That even a game that launches with crippling issues can, with enough time, commitment, and money, turn into something great. In 2012, when Error 37 spread across the Internet, gamers had thought Diablo III was doomed. And then it wasn’t.

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If you liked this book excerpt, don’t miss BLOOD, SWEAT, AND PIXELS, out on September 5 in print, e-book, and audiobook.