Changes

There will be no PvP in Diablo III at launch.

The Arena system will not be an esport, and the developers do not plan to put a great deal of effort into balancing Diablo 3's PvP combat, in terms of tweaking buffs, debuffs, stuns, CC skills, and all the rest that are required for PvP, but are not a major part of the PvE gameplay.

===Entering the Arena===

<blue><font color="#FFFFFF">Is there any requirement to enter the Arena? Like reaching a certain level or any other requirement?</font><br><br>Jay Wilson:</b> We actually haven’t made that call yet. It’s very likely that will be, since we’re finding that Arenas, outside of max level, tend to be highly imbalanced in ways we can’t readily fix. But even if there is a requirement for match-made arenas, we probably still allow people to play custom arena games that don’t count against their ratings, and upon those we likely wouldn’t put nearly as many restrictions.

Diablo III's PvP is not meant to be perfectly balanced, especially for 1v1 matches. There is just too much potential variety with character builds, plus equipment variance, skill runes, and more. D3 is not meant as an [[e-sport]] in that way. The "balance" is meant to be found more in the 3v3 duels, where teams can form and compensate for the weaknesses of any particular character in the group.

<blue>We intend to get PvP as balanced as we can, because we want it to be fun and have some meaning to it. But, PvP balance is not an integral goal to releasing the game. We want PvP to be fun, not necessarily balanced to a razors edge. With the huge number of combinations per character compounded by team comps, balance is not going to be something we’d hold the game for. If we did it might never come out. It will be balanced as much as we realistically can expect before releasing the game, and we’ll certainly continue to make changes to try to keep it fun and interesting.</blue>

The answer to that question was yes, through all of 2009 and 2010. Fans of the system said it would be awesome and true to the spirit of Hardcore. Doubters said it would keep the vast majority of Hardcore players from using the Arena, and would force HC players to make normal chars to enjoy the Arena. (See [[Hardcore#Arena_PvP|the Arena section of the Hardcore article]] for much more on this controversial issue.)

<blue>Wyatt Cheng: Our current position is that you don’t die in DiabloWikiPvP in DiabloWikiHardcore mode. So what happened in Diablo II is that anyone who wanted to do Hardcore PvP would basically level a character to level 10, and then they’d find another level 10 character, and they’d fight and one would die. That’s just not really that interesting. So we’re just going to let players engage in PvP. </blue>