Gold Dupe Bug Forces Diablo 3 Auction House Offline

[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.

 

[Slash2x]

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).

Yeah there have been WAY too many first day burns happening this year. I will be buying all of my games after they have had a chance to sit for about a month. That way it is easier to see what the real problems are and what the publisher will do about it. I am officially off of the pre-order wagon.

 

[Gray Firion]

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?

put it this way, it ruins the economy.


prices suddenly rise drastically by players knowing there is the glitch, thus making it so that the people doing said glitch are the only ones buying it.

entire item categories can be wiped clean and put back up for millions.


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.

plus, with that much gold you could of bought out everything and put it on the real money auction house and made a killing.

^This.

In games like these, with a trade system implemented for the players to use between themselves, the players end up creating Micro economies. Say a given item drops more often than others and the players it drops to want to sell it. To do that, they proceed to the Auction House and to see what kind of prices they should be using, they go to the items on sale and see what other people are currently charging for the same item, or similar items. If they charge too much, players will just buy from others if available. If they charge less then it's more likely to be bought, but their profit is lower obviously; thus, a balance is reached before long.

Rarer items on given servers are always worth lots of gold until other players find those same items and post them (and even then, if their power/look/status is high enough, they'll still be worth a lot). Because of this, once implemented, concerned players and developers will want as little a mess made with the auction house as possible, lest it destabilize the balance of power and gold from their servers. This is so similar to real world supply and demand relations that it could be used as a scientific testing ground. I believe it has already been used like this too, but if it was I don't remember. I'll look around to be sure =)

However, I still wonder why an auction house in Diablo 3 of all places had to exist. Don't get me wrong, an AH is a boon in an mmo, but it's a gamebreaker on a dungeon crawler. This is yet another issue ingame that could have been averted if the auction houses hadn't been implemented...

 

[Shockolate]

You know what the difference between playing Diablo 3 and playing Diablo 2 is?
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
MILLIONS AND MILLIONS AND MILLIONS DOLLARS!

Is that a Prime Time Players reference?

If it is not, ignore this post.

If it is:

Spoiler

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

If only Diablo 3 was made because devs love gaming, and not because publishers love money. Diablo 3 is the worst game of this generation.

 

[Little Gray]

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.

There is a difference between what a hundred or so testers can find and what and millions of players can.

Hear that Blizzard. make products not payment portals. It's sad, really. But the question is, and this is what snarks my widgets (sorry 'Grinds my Gears' is copyrighted), How did this bug get found out within just hours of the patch? Seriously, finding bugs is tedious work (as any programmer) considering the bug was introduced in the patch...how would someone try to exploit a bug they'd have no reason to believe existed? Then there's the matter of how fast it spread. People who find an exploit like that are more apt to keep it to themselves so they can monopolize the gains (if you found a goose that could lay golden eggs would you tell anyone?).

More you think about this the more it sounds olike an inside job, something someone at blizzard snuck in so they could exploit.

It got found out simply by accident like every single bug and so fast because of the large quantity of people who play diablo 3.

 

[xorinite]

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 increase in money + Finite Supply = Exponential Inflation.

Corrected.

Supply being the actual goods in question that you want, and money being the amount of exchange tokens you have to spend on them. If there were an actual infinite increase in supply, then the value of all goods would be zero, which would be infinite deflation.

Depending on how effectively they have removed the duplicated gold you may expect to see a hyper inflation of the gold piece, and a massive decrease in its strength against the dollar which will hit gold farmers pretty hard, although any with duplicated gold may have something of a windfall.

Perhaps they need to issue the 'New Gold Piece' each one worth 10,000,000 original gold pieces.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Corrected.

Whatever. Gold was destined to become worthless whichever direction you approach it from; either people spend it on items, or once the demand for items is filled, it just hangs around doing very little.

Perhaps they need to issue the 'New Gold Piece' each one worth 10,000,000 original gold pieces.

A temporary solution. Of course, the best solution, at least in terms of providing good gameplay, would be to not balance the game around grinding items for an economy.

But that would mean less free money for Blizzard, and in their eyes, that trumps any argument.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

If they can shut them down temporarily, then why not issue an optional patch to disable them permanently so you can play it offline?

 

[piinyouri]

If they can shut them down temporarily, then why not issue an optional patch to disable them permanently so you can play it offline?

The levels, enemies and everything else is still all generated by the server I believe.

 

[AuronFtw]

If they can shut them down temporarily, then why not issue an optional patch to disable them permanently so you can play it offline?

The levels, enemies and everything else is still all generated by the server I believe.

This is the same Blizzard that overhauled two massive continents in the biggest MMO in the world to allow for flying mounts. The notion that they can't code monster levels and map layouts into the client is ludicrous. They just don't want to. Forcing players to be always-online increases their likelihood of using the RMAH - which, in turn, increases revenue for Blizzard.

Like other people in the thread have pointed out, Blizzard has completely abandoned the idea of making a quality product - they are aiming for a cash cow, quality be damned. Features players want because they'll be fun to play are irrelevant to Blizzard, unless those features increase the revenue Blizzard gets - and any features that directly *decrease* from Blizzard's revenue (offline play, for example) are almost entirely out of the question.

 

[Lunar Templar]

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

I was just thinking the same thing.

Torchlight 2 is cheaper and better in every way that matters so it confounds me as to why D3 still has people playing it

 

[New Frontiersman]

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) would suffer a proportional decline. In value.

It's a bit off topic, and I'm sure I won't be the only one on here to mention it, but I feel I should point out that the United States got off the gold standard in 1971, thus the value of the US dollar isn't tied to the value of gold anymore. So that even if the price of gold were to rapidly drop in value, barring any external factors, the US dollar would be mostly unaffected.

Not that this has anything to do with the auction house at all, I just felt like I should clarify that.

 

[Xarathox]

Wait, I thought the whole DRM in D3 was the auction house. If that's "offline", doesn't that mean the whole game is offline for everyone?