Many users on Battle.net have taken to the Battle.net forums to request that Blizzard
rollback their servers to before the patch was launched, which would restore all
characters to their pre-patch state and wipe away the economic disruption caused by
the gold exploit.
Blizzard has temporarily disabled the Diablo III auction house after the game’s
recent 1.0.8 patch triggered an exploit which saw some users disrupting the game’s
economy by generating trillions of gold.
“After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning,” said Blizzard on its forums, “we
found that some players were exploiting a bug that enabled them to duplicate gold
through the Auction House. We’re working on fixing the bug right now, and bringing
the Auction Houses offline helps us troubleshoot in a more stable environment while
preventing further exploiting.”
Blizzard, however, says a rollback is not necessary. “We feel that this is the best
course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it,
and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region. We’ve been able
to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and
are focusing on these accounts to make corrections. While this is a time-consuming
and very detailed process, we believe it’s the most appropriate choice given the
circumstances.”
A post on the Battle.net forums claims that one Diablo III player has amassed 371
trillion gold using the exploit.
NeoGAF user fastford58 provided an overview of the problem, saying that crafty users
exploited the relationship between Diablo III’s gold and real-money auction houses to
rack up huge sums of in-game currency.
“It started with the new patch today. Blizzard dropped the gold floor from .25 cents
a mil to .25 cents per 10 mil. Enterprising players then bought gems for real money
and converted them to gold. People were making billions on this. But then! A gold
dupe has just been discovered with some streamers duping TRILLIONS in gold by playing
around with the 2 auction houses.”
Patch 1.0.8 for Diablo III was announced in April, and was primarily designed to
enhance the cooperative multiplayer aspects of the game. Blizzard says over one
million people play Diablo III every day.
Diablo III’s decision to incorporate an auction house has remained controversial
throughout the game’s lifespan. Speaking at GDC in March, former game director Jay
Wilson said the auction house had negatively impacted the game.