Blizzard has taken the Diablo 3 gold and real-money Auction Houses offline after the game’s 1.0.8 patch, which went live earlier today, introduced a gold duping bug that led to players amassing up to trillions in gold, causing serious problems with the Diablo 3 economy.
Announced in April, the patch aimed to bolster Diablo 3’s cooperative multiplayer experience. It added multiplayer bonus changes, matchmaking tags and a long list of general fixes.
“After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we made the decision to take the gold and real-money Auction Houses offline to investigate a bug that certain players were exploiting to dupe gold,” a Blizzard spokesperson told Polygon. “Our team is working hard to fix any outstanding issues and take appropriate actions with the accounts involved.”
According to a Battle.net post, many players now have billions in gold and one player has amassed 371 trillion gold through the exploitation. A NeoGAF forum member wrote that when Blizzard dropped the gold floor from $0.25 a million to $0.25 cents per 10 million “players then bought gems for real money and converted them to gold,” and then the gold dupe was discovered with “some streamers duping TRILLIONS.”
Blizzard revealed on a Battle.net post at 10:15 p.m. PT, that it believes it has found a fix for the gold duping bug and will deploy it to all regions. Diablo 3 will be in maintenance for an hour as a result.
Diablo 3 players are petitioning Blizzard via multiple threads on Battle.net to roll back to the start of the patch; however, Blizzard stated in a post that it needs “to determine whether or not a rollback is appropriate.”
