[Diablo 3] Reports of the Economy's death were greatly exaggerated

_J_

Suggested new thread title: Reports of the Economy's death were greatly exaggerated.

HexDex

Done.

Dranyth

I just noticed on a Twitch stream that Blizzard is apparently doing their account unlocking process and perma banning accounts which were found to have utilized the dupe exploit? Something like that, just started to happen like 30 minutes ago.

Zek

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8796520380#1

Hey everyone,

I'm John Hight, the production director for Diablo III. As most of you know, after the release of patch 1.0.8 a small number of players exploited a bug to duplicate gold. The bug has since been fixed, and the Auction Houses and gold trading are back online.

While the issue is resolved, we know a lot of players have questions about what happened and what we're doing about it, so I wanted to take some time to discuss the details with you here.

So, What Happened?

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.

What Does That Mean for Me?

Soon after the exploit was discovered, we contemplated doing a complete rollback, as was suggested by a number of players here in the forums.

The vast majority of players did not participate in the exploit and we didn't like the idea of punishing them for the bad behavior of a few people. A rollback would mean bringing the servers down for a lengthy period and a loss of all progression since 1.0.8 was released. Many players made significant accomplishments in the game that required time and dedication, and we felt it was worth the work involved to try to preserve these efforts and go after the exploiters instead.

With this in mind, we elected not to roll back the servers in The Americas and are instead working to remove duplicated gold from the economy through targeted audits and account actions (as indicated above) without taking away progress that our players rightfully earned.

As of this this post, we have already recaptured more than 85% of the excess gold from the accounts involved, and over the days ahead we will continue to pore over our audit data to reclaim as much duplicate currency as possible. We've also done a full audit of our code to help make sure that something like this doesn't happen again.

So, What's Next?

Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We're making sure that all legitimate transactions go through. This means that if your account was not involved in the exploit, you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House. We'll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players—including all of THEIR sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee—to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

Thank You!

On behalf of the development team, I just want to say thanks again to those of you who took the time to notify us about this situation, as well as apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you personally. We highly value fair play, and we’re going to continue to monitor the game and take steps necessary to prevent exploits like this from happening in the future.

_J_

Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We're making sure that all legitimate transactions go through. This means that if your account was not involved in the exploit, you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House. We'll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players—including all of THEIR sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee—to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

Nice.

Or, well, it sounds nice. Or it's a nice gesture.

bork

So plague bats is great. And those monks who pull stuff into a nice little pile? Those monks are my friends.

bork

From there, we were able to troubleshoot, develop a fix, test it, and deploy it to all regions before the day ended

I like that. Presumably by "develop a fix" he means "change the 10 back to a 1".

Chen

Sold another 9as 6cc ring on the RMAH, which I bought for 2m.

Unfortunately, gems seem to be rising.

Big Red Tie

Awesome, they're donating the money they made from dupers cashing out, as well as the duper's money, to charity

shadowane

I crafted some gloves that had 9% AS, 25% Crit Damage, and 10% CC + some strength but need to buy an Immortal King's belt before swapping to them for the All Resist. But I don't feel like spending too much on it so now need to wait until I think prices have leveled out. Kind of annoying. The gloves are almost freaking perfect except for a slightly low strength and a terrible potions + globes health bonus. Crafted shoulders are still bad though since I don't have All Resist on them.

Wydrion

I got four legendaries last night so all that talk of how the RNG hates me was only temporary. :')

However the first two of those were 500 dps Butcher's Sickle and Pus Spitter.

They're so bad I almost want to keep them forever.

mccart

If you have any shitty legendaries around and aren't using all your RMAH slots try putting them up, I've put up a couple things that would normally be brimstones that have sold for around 2 bucks.

KoopahTroopah

Just relisted everything, and yeah the AH looks more stable. I just have more gems and gold than I know what to do with, contemplating just selling them back on the RMAH for $1.00 each.

Big Red Tie

yeah, AH is pretty stable

i put up all the gear i bought on the RMAH lol

The Dude With Herpes

whats the lowest level slots start coming in gear?

sumwar

I wonder how long gold will be sold for 25 cents per mil. Tomorrow morning I will put up 10 stacks of gold. Right now it would expire at 12:36am-1:15am so I don't like that. Only people on west coast (I'm east coast) would be up at that time.

Dehumanized

sumwar wrote: »

I wonder how long gold will be sold for 25 cents per mil. Tomorrow morning I will put up 10 stacks of gold. Right now it would expire at 12:36am-1:15am so I don't like that. Only people on west coast (I'm east coast) would be up at that time.

at this point, it will never not be at the price floor

sumwar

I really want to buy gear I've got so much gold and my gear has so much room for improvement but I'm still waiting for the auction house to get less "shaky". I don't think the long term damage will be too severe. Inflation will be jumped 1-2 months ahead but I don't think it will be that bad. Even before this exploit inflation in Diablo 3 was crazy. Gold sinks in this game are lacking and gold farming bots are very active.

No Great Name

uber today/tonight anyone?

HexDex

I'll be around tonight, can do ubers.

sumwar

There was a streamer who got banned. He duped gold but didn't spread it around. I know many may disagree but I don't think he should be banned. It was stupid easy to dupe gold and he didn't spread the gold around by buying items or giving people gold.

RandomEngy

Well RSEs are at 27m and I still have my 800m in blood money. Yay! This calls for buying fancy pants.

Big Red Tie

sumwar wrote: »

There was a streamer who got banned. He duped gold but didn't spread it around. I know many may disagree but I don't think he should be banned. It was stupid easy to dupe gold and he didn't spread the gold around by buying items or giving people gold.

good idea gaming?

he showed 4000 people how to do it on his stream and explained how it worked

not all streamers are getting banned for the same reasons

Zek

People who exploited this bug expecting not to be permabanned deserve to be banned even harder for being so stupid.

Big Red Tie

the only time someone shouldn't be banned for it is if they did it once, and then sent in a bug report and didnt spend the gold or do it again

_J_

No Great Name wrote: »

uber today/tonight anyone?

I would be up for it.

SkutSkut

What time would you be doing ubers?

No Great Name

anytime we got 4 able people past this minute!!

Big Red Tie

yeah i can ubers at some point and freeze thinsg

_J_

No Great Name wrote: »

anytime we got 4 able people past this minute!!

Sented you a friend request.

No Great Name

ubers in 15?

Incindium

RMAH items are selling today . Sold 2 items today that I'd had listed on and off for weeks and I listed them slightly higher this morning than previously as well.

sumwar

I bought a bunch of gear and I do 200K DPS with battle rage but I can keep that up all the time. I can also keep up Wrath of the Berserker all the time and that isn't included in the 200K DPS, I forget how much I do fully buffed. I'm farming at a decent speed. I definitely would farm faster with better gear but I'm not farming horribly slow. I doubt I'll buy much more gear before the next expansion. Some upgrades for some of my items are 500m-1b+. That is retarded how expensive some of my upgrades must be to make a noticeable difference.

No Great Name

one spot for ubers

Zek

sumwar wrote: »

I bought a bunch of gear and I do 200K DPS with battle rage but I can keep that up all the time. I can also keep up Wrath of the Berserker all the time and that isn't included in the 200K DPS, I forget how much I do fully buffed. I'm farming at a decent speed. I definitely would farm faster with better gear but I'm not farming horribly slow. I doubt I'll buy much more gear before the next expansion. Some upgrades for some of my items are 500m-1b+. That is retarded how expensive some of my upgrades must be to make a noticeable difference.

At that point the better return on investment would be to gear up alts. PLs will fly by crazy fast if you twink them to MP5+.

Mr. Mojo Risin

So the auction house prices seem to be all over the place, Ive got an 1140 dps 1.78aps 174(i think) int chants that Im trying to price but similar stuff is anywhere from 100M to 600M

HooverFan

I'm in for the rest of the night, so i'm up for whatever... about to sign-in

CourtOfOwls

Hey everyone, been following this forum since the game came out and decided to finally join in. I have a monk at mp 5 and a mp0 WD, so if you guys need a group we should add each other. Thanks!

Rolo

mccart wrote: »

If you have any shitty legendaries around and aren't using all your RMAH slots try putting them up, I've put up a couple things that would normally be brimstones that have sold for around 2 bucks.

I suppose it would be more profitable to brimstone these, but I prefer popping into a public game and doing this.

mccart

When I had friends that still played I'd drop unidentified frostburns or gladiator gauntlets whenever we killed an elite; took them a while to figure out why they had such "rotten luck".