1) Why has the commodity auction house been down for over two weeks? I think an explanation of some kind is in order at this point.

The design of the system encouraged people to spam search and buy on commodities to get the lowest price. It was a bad design, and spawned behavior that was melting our servers. We've been working on the underlying system to alleviate server load.

2) Why are farming spots being "nerfed," in a game that encourages (requires) farming? There are threads around talking about good places to farm, that don't require gameplay exploits, that quickly get reported as now being nerfed. Of course this could be anecdotal, but I'm curious how the devs feel about "good" places to farm.

We've always stated that we don't want people farming single locations repeatedly, and especially locations where they don't fight monsters. We've mainly focused on nerfing things that fall into the latter camp.

3) How soon will the class banner sigils earned during the launch event be enabled?

We had some problems pulling the account names. Hopefully they shuld get flagged in the next couple weeks.

4) You've been quoted as saying that Diablo III loot is balanced around the existence of the Auction House. Could you clarify what you mean by that? Many people seem to assume that means there is "less" or "poorer" loot being dropped on an individual basis because we're expected to get our actual upgrades from the Auction House. I read it more as the existence of the Auction House allows a much wider variety of loot affixes. If a person had to rely on only their own drops or ad hoc trading, the game would have to roll most items with +Primary Stat and +Vitality/Resist. With the Auction House in play, the game can roll literally millions of crazy stat combinations, because even if you only get "crazy" drops, you can still use the Auction House for the hard-to-upgrade slots. Thoughts?

I'm sorry, I don't remember saying that and if I did then I was drunk and/or wrong. We tuned and balanced the game without the auction house, as there weren't enough people internally using it to test it against gameplay, so we didn't design anything for it.

5) Is there any official source detailing what the various weapon damage type (Holy, Fire, Cold, etc) effects are in combat? There is third party theory-crafting out there regarding this, but I can't find any in-game or official source that imparts this information. Along with this, what is the rationale for keeping information like this hidden within the game? There are accusations that Diablo III has been "dumbed down" in this way, (see: widespread ignorance about Elective Mode), could you elaborate on what drove design and UI decisions like this?

They are all aesthetic, except cold damage, which chills targets and conversely gets a damage reduction to account for the extra utility.

6) WHY U DESECRATOR JAILER MORTAR?? WHYYYY?!

Because we love you.

7) Do you have any plans to create an "open world" mode where all the waypoints are active and without the seemingly artificial act barriers?

Answered already.

there will maintenance AGAIN today...  anyone knows the local time??

SOS?