Diablo III Gold Exploit patched, Auction House Returns

Last week when Blizzard updated Diablo III, the update had an unintended result of opening an exploit in the real money auction house that allowed players to siphon trillions of gold from the online marketplace. This virtual currency has a value on the real money auction house, so as you can imagine, the results were potentially crippling to the Diablo III economy.

Shortly following the exploit, Blizzard shutdown the Auction house, suspended players who used the exploit for personal gain, leaving many questioning whether the auction house would return at all. Blizzard’s John Hight recently explained on the Battle.net forums how Blizzard has remedied the problems, and the auction house is now back online.

“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,” Hight explains.

While Blizzard claims that only a small percentage of Diablo III players participated in the exploit, they’ll be looking to validate transactions during the period. This means that if you made transactions during the event that weren’t related to the exploit, you’ll get to keep your gold and items. Blizzard did issue bans and suspensions to players involved in the exploit, and those that were made for personal gain were “intercepted”, and will be donated to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.