Last week Diablo 3 had an economic crisis, a duplicate money exploit was found meaning that players could profit highly in the Auction House which nets users real money. Blizzard had to respond by shutting down the whole system until they discovered how to fix the exploit and find out who used it to gain an advantage.
The system is back online now and Blizzard identified the 415 users that used the exploit, locked there accounts and are giving any money gained by these users to charity.
Production director John Hight explained on the battle.net forums what the situation was:
“We elected not to roll back the servers in The Americas and are instead working to remove duplicated gold from the economy through targeted audits and account actions without taking away progress that our players rightfully earned,” he said.
“As of this this post, we have already recaptured more than 85% of the excess gold from the accounts involved, and over the days ahead we will continue to pore over our audit data to reclaim as much duplicate currency as possible”
“Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We’re making sure that all legitimate transactions go through. This means that if your account was not involved in the exploit, you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House,” Hight said.
“We’ll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players – including all of their sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee – to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.”
Overall this is a good result for everyone, although people were stopped from using the Auction house for a few days at least the people who exploited the game have been found and and a good charity gets some money. There is always a lot of risk involved when a game uses a real money auction system and this goes to show that things can go very wrong. Thankfully the situation is over and people can go back to playing normally once again.
Let me know in the comments if you think the real money Auction house system in Diablo 3 is a good thing.
