Discord is partially down: 'Many users are unable to start their sess…

As of 12:08 pm Pacific on Friday, Discord was investigating errors preventing some users to connect to the chat application. At 12:24, Discord said it had identified the issue: "Many users are unable to start their sessions at this time." librea.one

In an update at 12:56 pm Pacific, Discord confirmed that the issue is still preventing some users from logging in and sending messages, but it's "continuing to work to remediate the issues impacting availability."

If you already had Discord open, you may not notice the downtime, but those booting it up may be unable to connect.

We've tested out Discord on our own machines and noticed that we get an error while trying to load friends' profiles, presumably due to the API issues. If you see "Unable to load parts of profile" while clicking someone's avatar, you're in the same boat. Connecting to some servers is also giving us a familiar red "Messages failed to load " error.

Developing...

Diablo 4 has had its fair share of bugs that players have gleefully exploited. If it's not some item that gives you the power to deal infinite damage, it's a dungeon dropping too much loot. Diablo is a complicated videogame; unforeseen interactions are kind of inevitable.

But that's not how I'd describe the latest thing players are exploiting in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred. There's an item with a number so big that I cannot imagine anyone at Blizzard would've thought it was OK to do on purpose. Someone must've forgotten a decimal point because it's the sole reason players are currently making billions more gold than is normally possible.

A new Lord of Hatred Horadric seal item says you will earn 900% more gold when you equip it. Not 9% or 90%. It says 900% and it means it. No other item has a number that big, which is why many players think it's a mistake. The amount of gold that drops scales way up as you climb into the highest difficulty levels already, but with this item, you don't really need to worry about it again.

In the past, gold wouldn't be much of an issue. But in Lord of Hatred, there are quite a lot of things that will empty your pockets. Something as simple as swapping out a single stat on an item can cost millions of gold to gamble for the one you want. And the new skill trees that modify the game's different endgame activities charge you 40 million or more just to move your points around. Forget the ultra rare mythic uniques: Gold is the true endgame chase item.

Well, it was until word got around that this specific item buff can solve all your problems. The gold-boosting seal isn't hard to get either. You need to reroll other seals in the new Horadric Cube crafting system until it pops out. You then need a set of charms normally meant for low-level players to equip alongside the seal for the bonus to activate. Those require dropping your difficulty setting and rerolling charms until you get the right ones. Anyone who has been playing fairly regularly for the last week should have all the materials to do this in a few minutes. Diablo 4 streamer Wudijo has a quick video on how this process works if you've never done any of this before.

You sacrifice a bit of your character's power to become richer than you'd ever really need to be in just a few hours with the seal equipped. There are dungeons that drop extra gold and bonuses on the activity skill trees that make for a ridiculous combination, netting you a few billion every run. In just a few hours of grinding with this item, gold will no longer be a concern.

The only people who don't benefit from this little mistake are those who buy items from other players on trade websites. Prices are about to go way up as players get their hands on this broken item and it'll be mandatory if you actually want to be able to afford anything—at least until Blizzard notices and sticks a decimal point on there.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the immense pressure for the game to succeed, given the publisher's massive investment into Rockstar's long-awaited crime caper. He described the risk the company's taking in a way that, unfortunately, I can only describe as going kinda hard.

"Development costs have gone up and up. And we really do aim to deliver the highest quality entertainment on Earth," Zelnick told Bloomberg. "And that is costly. And AI influence is not withstanding. We haven't seen those costs decline yet. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't."

The cost of triple-A development has been a hot button issue this console generation, with increasing technological and graphical complexity demanding correspondingly larger team sizes and bigger budgets. High-profile, expensive sales failures beg the question whether smaller team sizes, shorter development cycles, and cheaper games should be embraced as an alternative.

But Zelnick still wants the publisher to focus on blockbusters, and he seems to accept that you have to spend money to make money. “That's a high-stakes game for big boys only," said Zelnick, "And I'm cool with it.”

It's a turn of phrase that, quite frankly, tickled my fancy. It almost made up for the part of the interview where Zelnick said he sees Xbox and PlayStation as Rockstar's "core" audience, hence GTA 6's customary delayed launch on PC.

"We never claim success before it occurs," Zelnick said, before describing the company's strategy as, "We try to give them unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection." And "unlimited" really seems to mean "unlimited," as evidenced by GTA 6's long gestation, several delays, and eye-watering estimated budget.

Business Insider provided a $1-$1.5 billion figure from anonymous industry analysts in its own feature on Zelnick, but this seems to be the low end of the GTA 6 budget ballpark. In a LinkedIn post from last August, before GTA 6 was delayed from May to November 2026, Josh Chapman of venture capital firm Konvoy cited a $2 billion estimated investment from Take-Two.

GTA 6 O'Clock newsletter writer Dan Dawkins argued that $3.4 billion is a more likely figure, factoring in preproduction and Rockstar's payroll over the last 6 years of development. If that's not a high-stakes game for big boys only, I don't know what is.

Back to Chapman and Konvoy, they predicted that Take-Two would break even within a month, assuming a $2 billion budget, and that the game would rake in $7.6 billion in total revenue within 60 days of launch⁠—and that's before you get to the long tail of sales GTA 6 will presumably have, if the previous game in the series is anything to go by.

Modder RPGKing117 has had a busy month: He committed the blasphemy of putting Skyrim quest markers in Morrowind, achieved the triumph of cramming Morrowind into Fallout 4, and has no come back for one last job: Making Fallout 1 playable on Fallout 4's Pip-Boys and assorted vacuum tube, monochrome computer terminals.

This sequel mod does not yet have a public release, but will presumably be made available on RPGKing117's GitHub and Nexus pages like the Morrowind project before it. We do, however, already have a YouTube video of the mod in action for our viewing pleasure.

The Morrowind Mod used Fallout 4 Script Extender and the OpenMW source port to run both games at the same time, rendering Morrowind on the in-game screens of Fallout 4. Script Extender allows the player to launch Morrowind from within Fallout 4 and pass your control inputs through both games. A custom version of OpenMW streams its framebuffer⁠—the data sent from your GPU to your screen⁠—onto the in-game screens of Fallout 4.

As for how the Fallout 1 mod differs from the Morrowind one, we won't know the full story until RPGKing117 releases the full project on GitHub. There's a source port like OpenMW available for Fallout 1, Alex Batalov's Community Edition, and my assumption would be that this is what RPGKing117 used in his own project.

If you want to try this mod for yourself, keep an eye on RPGKing117's Nexus Mods or GitHub page for its release. I'm a huge sucker for game-within-a-game gags like this, and I'm always keen to see the farthest frontiers of absurdity people are willing to reach. Plus, much as I love the "Doom on anything" gag, it's nice to see people branch out into other classics.