Diablo 3's auction houses back in bidness, gold-duping exploit now fixed

Blizzard announced yesterday that Diablo 3's auction houses had been put back online, after a gold-duplication exploit introduced by a recent patch caused them to temporarily shut up shop. The bug has now been fixed and gold trading is once again possible, according to Production Director John Hight in the accompanying forum post , which goes on to explain exactly what happened with the bug, and how Blizzard have responded over the last few days. Long story short: 85% of the illicit gold has been recovered, and all proceeds from auctions conducted by now-banned or suspended players has been given to charity.

Here's a relevant chunk of text taken from the forum post:

"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."

If you were involved in any non-naughty transactions during Gold-gate, fear not, as Blizzard promise "you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House".

Thanks to BluesNews .