It may have been an unfortunate turn of events, but the exploit discovered in Diablo 3 last week that allowed players to add a new, unearned chunk of cash to their existing funds has actually lead to some good. Although some players will be banned for attempting to break the game’s solid economy, all of the profits made during last week’s incident will be donated to charity.
The problem started after the official launch of the 1.0.8. patch, which had been tested for quite some time. Some adventurers had discovered a way to add trillions of Diablo 3 Gold to their total through an auction-house oversight, and while the developers solved the problem in a short period of time, the real-money features of the game were left offline for a few days.
“For those just tuning in, we decided to perform a complete audit and focus on the few players that exploited this bug rather than performing a full rollback and taking everyone offline for a day (or more) – losing all the progress they made,” read an official statement.
“Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We’re making sure that all legitimate transactions go through,” Blizzard said. “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.”
Diablo 3’s Auction Houses were brought back online late Friday night. The team will continue to remove duplicated gold from the game’s economy rather than doing a complete rollback, which would bring the servers down and delete all player progress. According to Hight, more than 85 percent of the duplicate gold has already been removed.