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Blizzard donates cheater profits to charity

The auction house is back online and justice has been dealt out.

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Last week a bug in a patch that allowed the real money auction house to be exploited pretty much derailed the economy of Blizzard's Diablo III. Stopping short of a roll back, Blizzard have now brought the auction house back online and banned those who took advantage of the glitch.

Blizzard described the events as follows on their official forums:

"Shortly after we released patch 1.0.8 in the Americas on Tuesday, players discovered a bug that allowed gold to be duplicated via the real-money Auction House. The bug was the result of a coding error that was exposed when we increased the gold stack size from 1 million to 10 million. This resulted in an overflow on cancelled auctions that yielded a greater amount of gold in return. Only a relatively small number of players had the billions of gold necessary to exploit the bug, and only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain.

To all of you who reported this to us, thank you! As soon as we confirmed what was happening, we took the Auction Houses in the Americas offline and suspended gold trading in order to isolate the problem. From there, we were able to troubleshoot, develop a fix, test it, and deploy it to all regions before the day ended-also ensuring that patch 1.0.8 rolled out in other regions (without the bug) as scheduled. The Auction Houses remained offline and gold trades remained suspended until we completed a full audit of all transactions that occurred during this period. Once that was completed, we brought everything back online.

While this was happening, we locked accounts that appeared to be exploiting the bug as well as collaborators that held gold or items for the exploiters. Once we confirmed that an account was involved in this exploit, we either banned or rolled back the account depending on their activity."

All profits earned by cheaters and banned players are to be donated to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. A silver lining as good as any.

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