Auction Houses Up and Running
The Production Director of Diablo 3 John Hight has issued a statement about the recent happenings with the US Auction Houses.
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(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.
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.
I had to read that a few times, i thought they were joking, maybe they only collected a grand total of 10$ because the gold was so cheap.
Step 1: Dupe 20 trillion gold
Step 2: Buy every valuable 2 billion GAH item that usually sells for 100-200+ bucks on the RMAH.
Step 3: Put those items up on the RMAH for a third of the price to ensure they sell quickly.
Step 4: ?????
Step 5: Profit.
To the 415 idiots that duped. If you guys already had billions. why cheat? So stupid guess you guys have nothing now =) thanks for putting me up quite a few ranks of DP.
I think the most important fact is: The economy isnt ruined. Everything is back to normnal. And everyone can use the AH, and RMAH again, with an amazing patch that people are hella enjoying it.
You WONT see a service like this from ANY other company.
This is literally the company you paid ur 40 bucks of game to, that has been giving you free updates and free fixes and free content ever since the game was released. They still care, they still make good games and top notch service.
If you cant move on from a simple bug, and play again. well dood, you really need to find another hobby. its kind of sad.
cheers,
That alone makes this entire situation a win regardless of outlying benefactors or an economic burp. Still dream of the AHs not existing at all, but with some shady billionaires banned, that lack of market manipulation will work out to be a positive for the AHs in the long run.
Now my hope is that Blizzard will be a bit more zelous with quality check for the AH. <.<
Excellent first post. Glad to have you aboard.
Wait... it's after midnight, so opposite day is over. I retract everything.
I think you're gullible for thinking the economy was ruined and still believing this game is a "failtrain".
lol at this guy for making an account just to say something belittling and negative about a blizzard game and the people who enjoy it.
He's all kinds of awesome.
Anyway, I'm impressed that blizz chose to handle this matter in the way they did with maximum penalties for exploiters and almost none for the honest player base (aside from a few days of no AH). I'm glad there was no rollback.
So now I'm down $182.30 from buying gems, with my accounts banned with like $600-700 of items on it, and unable to even get a ticket response to answer what they think I did wrong that deserves a ban.
Figured they'ed ban dupers, but banned for selling gems is pretty ridiculous.
Did you try writing to Blizzard?
I made an attempt at it, getting back the most generic response possible from Customer Service Rep Whimso:
The details from my email don't tell me anything, or even why I was banned:
I made some pretty good friends from both the Blizzard forums, my YouTube channel, and friends from previous Blizzard games which already offered helping me re-gear to as good gear as what I wore in my videos, so simply getting back into the game really is no issues aside from paying $60 on a new account. However, I'm still really undecided what I want to do from here, as I simply can not understand why Blizzard handled things the way they did. The thing is their "careful review" is absolute bullshit. I mean they can look at my RMAH sale, Gold AH sales, and see exactly what I did, which didn't involve duping gold.
Meanwhile, we have people that pull off things like this, and somehow manage to remain un-banned. Nothing against they guy, but he really deserves a rollback, LOL. I'm almost certain that their "careful review" involved a script coded more poorly than black weapon damage and +%elemental damage, which results in the wrong people getting bans/rollbacks.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=30ll1zo&s=5
^ Has 444 BILLION gold after the bans/rollback, and streaming it. How careful could the review possibly be?
To me it appears they simply temporarily locked your account, which is just a suspension. A few months ago, I got the same e-mail after I sold and purchased on the RMAH far too quickly and I guess it triggered some alert on their side, and my account was promptly locked.
I did send an e-mail to them, including my PayPal transactions history, a government-issued ID, and a ton of more information to clear things up. I was unlocked within a couple of hours.
In your case, it doesn't seem as if you were banned. The e-mail is quite different and if you were banned, it'd clearly state your account is permanently banned. A friend of mine was perma-banned and had an e-mail to show for it. Also Error 52 or something like that when you attempt to log in.
Worst case scenario, you end up perma-banned. Second-worst case, you get your account back, but with rollback BoA effect on all your gear. And finally, hoping you're just temp suspended and all will be well after they complete their audits.
Multiple people on my friends list were temporarily suspended. Because at the time of gold duping, if you sold mass gems for 10x the regular price of gems, you were actively taking part in manipulating the market. It's part of their whole investigation.