This week, Blizzard will be releasing Diablo II patch 1.09c. The patch adds a new feature to the program that is important, but also has the potential to be misunderstood [...].

Included in the patch is a .dll file that will relay non-personal, non-identifying information about a user's computer to Blizzard. Specifically: CPU, RAM, operating system, video card and sound card information.

Historically, the best customers for Blizzard games are players of previous Blizzard games, and while it's tempting to go for high-end specifications with our upcoming Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos to get the maximum amount of bells and whistles out of it, we also want it to be playable by as many of our current customers as we can, and so we're going to compile this information for that purpose.

Two important things to note [...]: 1) this is only taking place in North America, and 2) users can opt out of participating in this hardware specification survey when they download the patch.

We understand that user privacy is an important matter to our customers, and are attempting to balance privacy needs with the best means possible of accurately ascertaining current users' hardware information.