The realer the in-game currency, the harder the players will try to exploit the system to make a quick buck. Diablo 3’s recently released 1.0.8 patch may have brought along a slew of fixes and game enhancements, but an exploit has allowed some users to disrupt the game's economy by generating trillions of gold. Because of this turn of events, the company has disabled the title’s real-money auction house for an unspecified period of time.
“After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we found that some players were exploiting a bug that enabled them to duplicate gold through the Auction House,” Blizzard said on its forums. “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.”
Since then, a handful of updates have been released to keep players notified on what seems to be causing the issue and when the service will return. The problem has technically been resolved, but some testing needs to be done before the team moves forward.
“Maintenance has concluded, and the fix has been implemented. Once we’ve been able to test this fix and verify that it works correctly, we'll then mark the gold and real-money auction house live.”
A post on the Battle.net forums states that a single Diablo III player gained 371 trillion gold through this bug. That’s a significant sum, and some users are claiming it’s the relationship between Diablo III's gold and real-money auction houses that’s causing the problem. It’s not a pretty situation, but the developer will not be rolling back the update. A fix has been found, and now it’ll just take a bit of time to get everything back on track.
“At this time (and after careful consideration), we've decided to not move forward with rolling back the servers,” Blizzard said. “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.”
