Diablo 
III might have met some initial skepticism, but it’s still a hot property with players.
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, the first expansion for the click-tastic role-playing game, has sold 2.7 million copies in its first week. And it’s proving nearly as popular with gaming voyeurs. Diablo III views on Twitch on the expansion’s launch day topped 2.4 million.
As 
if it weren’t hard enough to know what to trust on the internet, today is April Fool’s Day – meaning the number of merry pranksters is expanded exponentially.
Gaming sites – and game makers – especially love to test people’s gullibility (or, in some cases, just have fun). To help protect you from falling for some of the tricks out there, though, we offer this handy (completely true!) list of some of the more notable hoaxes from April Fool’s Day 2014.
Blizzard 
is at the heart of a storm of controversy after players of World of Warcraft caught wind of an offer giving anyone the opportunity to pay their way to a Level 90 character.
The offer was spotted by WoW Insider, who took took a screengrab of what clearly looks like the ability to buy a Level 90 character for a shocking $60. The offer has since been removed.
The 
New Year is off to a lousy start for some of the gaming industry’s largest digital distribution sites.
Valve’s Steam, EA’s Origin, and Blizzard’s Battle.net were the target of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks Thursday night, which overloaded servers and took the sites offline. All three have adjusted their firewalls and are back online at this point.
Blizzard 
is eliminating one of the biggest pain points of Diablo III.
The in-game auction house, where players use real money to buy high-level gear and in-game gold, is going away on March 18, 2014.
Diablo 
III is about to get darker.
The clicktastic action role-playing game, which set a record as the fastest-selling PC game of all timewhen it launched in May of 2012, will see its first add-on with the newly announced Reaper of Souls expansion. In true Blizzard style, though, the developer didn’t give a time frame to the expansion’s release.
Bobby 
Kotick, the sometimes controversial CEO of Activision-Blizzard, is leading an $8.2 billion buyout from parent company Vivendi, a move that will restore independence to the world’s largest video game publisher.
The agreement will occur in a pair of purchases. Activision, as a company, will acquire 429 million shares for $5.83 billion in cash, while an investor group headed by Kotick and co-chairman Brian Kelly will separately purchase another 172 million shares for $2.34 billion. Kotick and Kelly have personally invested a combined $100 million into the company.
Malicious 
tomfoolery is afoot in Azeroth.
Blizzard Entertainment has issued a warning to World of Warcraft players, noting that the number of unauthorized logins has been on the rise recently, a sign that hackers are targeting player accounts and stealing their in-game gold.
While 
plenty of us thought it would never come to pass, it appears the World of Warcraft movie is actually happening.
Shooting on the feature is set to begin next year, which would keep it on track for its planned summer 2015 release.
Blizzard 
Entertainment is turning a potential PR disaster into a PR coup.
Last week, the developer discovered a programming bug that let players of the blockbuster role-playing game Diablo III duplicate their in-game gold, resulting in inflated prices in the game’s auction house, which uses real-world money.
Chris Morris: Journalist 