Thursday, 9 May 2013

Dupe takes the Diablo 3 Auction House offline



Ever since the Diablo 3 launch people have been searching for (and finding) dupes. The Diablo 3 1.0.8 patch released yesterday brought us another dupe exploit allowing many users, as stated on a Battle.net forum post, to make billions, and for certain users, trillions of gold. We're not entirely sure how much gold was duped, but we do know the exploit was real and that the real money auction house was/is down 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."

A fix has been found for the issue and Blizzard is currently testing that fix. They've announced that despite recieving a lot of requests for a rollback, they won't actually do one. "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."

When we asked our sources at Blizzard what would happen to the exploiters, they were unable to tell us. We assume a lot of people are going to be banned, but they might have already made their money from the dupe. The only thing we've been able to learn is that they're in the process of "reviewing the accounts involved and taking appropriate actions, including temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans."