Gold Dupe Bug Forces Diablo 3 Auction House Offline

[Andy Chalk]

Gold Dupe Bug Forces Diablo 3 Auction House Offline

A bug in the latest Diablo 3 patch has reportedly left many players with billions of gold, but Blizzard says a rollback isn't going to happen.

The Diablo 3 1.0.8 patch that went live yesterday introduced an economy-breaking gold duplication bug that allowed many users, according to a Battle.net forum post [http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8769238195], to acquire billions of illegitimate gold; one particularly industrious player apparently racked up 371 trillion. Those numbers are unconfirmed but the bug is definitely real, and Blizzard has taken both the gold and real money auction houses offline as a result.

"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," Diablo 3 Community Manager Lylirra explained. "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 has since come up with a fix and is now in the process of testing it, and has also announced that despite calls for it from many players, the servers will not be rolled back. "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," she wrote. "We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

The fate of those who took advantage of the bug remains unclear; Blizzard said in its initial announcement of the auction house shutdown that it has begun the process of "reviewing the accounts involved and taking appropriate actions, including temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans."

Source: Battle.net [http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8770118014]


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[josemlopes]

We cant let them roll on their fake money after all.

Im not totally sure of how the auction house works and all but does the fact that some guys no longer have to grind for gold mean that it breaks the whole system?

 

[Aeshi]

Does this mean the bad players are going to have to go find something else to blame their lack of basic spatial awareness on?

 

[Slash2x]

Hold it I think everyone is missing the real news here....... People are still playing that turd?

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Um... Blizzard, why would you ban players for taking advantage of your screw up? Oh yeah, and also does it really break the game that they now have a huge fuck tonne of fake money? And if so, who does it break the game for? Well them obviously.

 

[Comocat]

We cant let them roll on their fake money after all.

Im not totally sure of how the auction house works and all but does the fact that some guys no longer have to grind for gold mean that it breaks the whole system?

Because if you have 371 trillion dollars, would you really care if paid a million dollars for a 1 dollar Snickers bar?

 

[flarty]

Gold would rapidly drop in value and as a side effect all currencies that are wholey or partially weighted by the precious metal (like say the US dollar)

Sorry pal, Nixon took the US$ off the gold standard in 71, its a fiat currency along with other other currency that was underwritten by the dollar at the time. As for the rest, your pretty much on the mark

 

[AdamG3691]

Man way back when I used to dupe items in Final Fantasy 2 all the time on the SNES. Hell I remember when these sorts of things were considered cool and there used to be entire sections of gaming magazines dedicated to them.

sorry, can't hear you, I'm too busy stealing an old man's name and swimming along the side of this island until eldritch horrors appear and give me 1024 of whatever is in my 8th inventory slot

I miss MissingNo, although he did turn my pokemon blue cartridge into the source of ALL the glitches on earth (seriously, even the relevant data is garbage data now, the whole cart is a goddamned mess that even restarting the game won't fix)

 

[CriticalMiss]

The saga of the Diablo 3 auction house continues! It's almost like a soap opera character, causing trouble and mayhem but never going away. Next week it will get amnesia and father an illegitimate child with Sim City.

 

[DTWolfwood]

haha awesome it means stuff on the auction house will no long be affordable and people will actually have to play the game to get better.

Assuming it works like a real economy and this influx of gold creates a rampant inflation event.

 

[Keith K]

You have to wonder about the QA practices of something in which a loophole can be found and thoroughly exploited within a day of release.

 

[shintakie10]

The saga of the Diablo 3 auction house continues! It's almost like a soap opera character, causing trouble and mayhem but never going away. Next week it will get amnesia and father an illegitimate child with Sim City.

This is more a saga of the douchey than the saga of the AH.

I'm fully expectin bans for the more blatant offenders. Its been said time and time again. If you find a bug, test it a couple times to make sure its repeatable. If you can, report it and move on. If it isn't, still report it, but mention that you couldn't get it to happen more than once.

If you continually use a bug to your advantage, dont report the bug, and then go so far as to brag about it someplace I hope you get banhammered so hard you aren't allowed into any multiplayer games ever again.

 

[SmugFrog]

The saga of the Diablo 3 auction house continues! It's almost like a soap opera character, causing trouble and mayhem but never going away. Next week it will get amnesia and father an illegitimate child with Sim City.

Awesome, just awesome. I so hope to see this news story on here someday.

I never picked up Diablo 3. I loved #2, but being in the military without a consistent internet connection and limited time to play games = no D3. Perhaps someday, when it's in a used bargain bin at one of the game stores... (remember those days of PC gaming?)

 

[Atmos Duality]

haha awesome it means stuff on the auction house will no long be affordable and people will actually have to play the game to get better.

Assuming it works like a real economy and this influx of gold creates a rampant inflation event.

It should.
Infinite Supply + Finite Demand = Exponential Inflation.

 

[Tiamattt]

That PS3 version looks better and better with each passing day.

 

[wulfy42]

I'm sure most if not all of the people smart enough to figure out the dupe (since it wasn't widely spread around) were also smart enough not to use it on their primary account, and just transfered it to other accounts. While Blizzard could go back and monitor which characters/accounts entered games with them, the obvious answer to a situation where trillions of gold was able to be made, is to simply roll back the servers a few hours. If 1000 players found the dupe and gave out money to just 20 different friends etc, that is 20k different accounts blizzard is going to have to review. By the time they do that, those 20,000 accounts could easily have given money to others etc.

I stopped playing this game 2 weeks after it came out, and haven't looked back yet. Path of Exile, and later Torchlight 2 both were far more enjoyable to me. I am really amazed there are so many people still playing D3 after all this time.

 

[Lucane]

We cant let them roll on their fake money after all.

Im not totally sure of how the auction house works and all but does the fact that some guys no longer have to grind for gold mean that it breaks the whole system?

Yeah it does or at least it can anyway.
Back when I played FFXI the auction house was a mystery to me for the first few months but I know Japan had the servers to themselves for the first few months but ultimately the prices on the AH are not clearly set in game but by the people.

the AH showed the history of the last ten sells that went through if there are not a lot of sellers of the item then they can attempt to raise the price especially if the only way the item can be made is by crafting it making it a seller's market though if a lot of people are selling their goods then the price might drop a bit as the cheapest item is sold first for the offered price. What makes this system worse are two main factors unequal guilds and large amounts of money going into the market (from bugs,gold farmers, or etc. that don't take as long as most natural in-game means to obtain it.) If a person obtains a million "Gil" (FFXI currency) in a minute when making a 1,000 takes over half an hour they might not mind spending a little more to on things that don't completely bankrupt them right away if the AH had fixed prices it wouldn't be much of an issues but with them changing at the sellers discretion then cheapening the price isn't likely if some people will continue to (create/buy/duplicate in-game money) ultimately making some items so bizarrely priced they can only be bought by people who "cheat" to make money. This is also how and/or why some portions of Gold sellers might appear to be legitimate players that only work on crafting items for overly inflated prices to make back most of the money they sold in the first place to A. ease the burden of acquiring money on themselves and B. Keeping the money out of the market for long or as long otherwise.

Sorry putting down so much text, but that's a bit of an old gripe for me ^^;

 

[ExtraDebit]

Hold it I think everyone is missing the real news here....... People are still playing that turd?

I was thinking the samething lol. After diablo 3 and the disappointment of heart of the swarm (no lurkers.....really?????!!!?! and all the cool units are single player only???!!! WTF!!!!), I don't think I'll ever buy a blizzard game without reading a review I trust (yahzee).

 

[Lucane]

Man way back when I used to dupe items in Final Fantasy 2 all the time on the SNES. Hell I remember when these sorts of things were considered cool and there used to be entire sections of gaming magazines dedicated to them (I sent that item dupe code to EGM every month for a year and the fuckers never printed it. Bastards!)

If we were to apply the gaming environment of today to the gaming of yesteryear then the warp whistle in Super Mario 3 would only be available via microtransaction and I probably would have lost all access to my Final Fantasy 2 game for duping all those pink tails various other items like I did.

That's the difference between single player an multi-player it's either you verse the world or you verse everyone else and in this case the world can't/won't/doesn't complain about it being unfair and usually only effects the current play-through unless a leader-board is attached. (Like what happened to Terraria's console versions.)

 

[Tiamattt]

While a rollback would be the easiest choice, that would make a few legitimate players a bit pissed. The saying "Only takes one to ruin it for everyone" comes to mind.

Think this is one of those situations where no matter what the fix is, it's going to piss someone off. So I would go with the fix that would do that to the least amount of people, which imo would be the rollback since it seems better then wrecking the economy for a lot more legitimate players. Needs of the many and all that.