Diablo III Market Down: Rollback Axed As Gold-Dupers Hunted

If you've been playing Diablo III (or Diablo 3, if you prefer), this week, you know that there's been a bit of a break in the normal everyday action in both the Gold and Real-Money Auction Houses. It is there that users have unleashed an exploit which allows the earning of billions in in-game gold, this being the virtual cash currency aside from the real-cash currency available in the auction house. Players have reported the axing of accounts due to this procedure stacking up to a head this Wednesday.

At approximately midnight Pacific time here on the 8th of May, 2013, the servers for Diablo III were kept in good standing where a consideration was cut: administrators decided not to roll back the entire game. Where administrators were forced to consider rolling the game back to an earlier point in time this week, they've instead made a move to find the creators of the bug and destroy them. Or boot them from the game, that is.

This mess began late last night when a gold duplication bug was identified by Battle.net. It was then that they began cutting all gold trades across the game's online servers from top to bottom, keeping then normal trades of items where no gold was involved. As maintenance concluded less than an hour later, administrators suggested a fix was in the works that'd be implemented soon after.

"At this time (and after careful consideration), we've decided to not move forward with rolling back the servers. We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it, and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region. 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. 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." – Administrator Lylirra for Battle.net

So no worries for those of you out there worrying about the awesome number of levels you've jumped since yesterday: you're good to go. Meanwhile Battle.net will be hunting down the culprits of this terrible economy-wrecking madness non-stop until they are found. This auction house has been under fire since the beginning of the game, having most recently been the subject of scrutiny via former Diablo III director Jay Wilson who made it clear: if they could pull the plug on the real-money part of the auction house, they would.