Diablo 3’s Auction House to Remain Offline for an Extended Period of Time

Diablo 3’s auction house, which allows player to use both real and in-game money to buy and sell the greatest gear in all the land, is still offline. Two days ago, after a massive patch was added to the game in order to incorporate more than a fair share of gameplay additions, players discovered a way to mess with the system in order to duplicate gold. Some sneaky little gamers managed to gain trillions of coins through an exploit that Blizzard had overlooked, and because of this, the feature has been removed for to maintain the economy’s integrity.

“As we mentioned earlier, we're currently auditing transactions that were performed on the both the gold and real-money Auction House following the discovery of a gold exploit after patch 1.0.8 released,” a post on the official site states. “For those just tuning in, we decided to perform a complete audit and focus on the few players that exploited this bug rather than performing a full rollback and taking everyone offline for a day (or more) – losing all the progress they made.”

The actual fix has been found, so as of now, the team is doing audit work in order to get everything back to a safe, balanced state. However, this is quite the time-intensive project, as the auction house was expected to be back online yesterday.

“We don’t have a new ETA, but we anticipate that the service will be unavailable for at least another 24 hours. We’ll continue to provide updates in this thread regarding the status of our Auction House maintenance as they become available.”

This news was delivered late last night, so it’s safe to say that Diablo 3 players won’t be able to barter until either later tonight or early tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for more updates.