Blizzard Is Donating Ill-Gotten Auction House Gains
Due to a bug that allowed gold to be duplicated in Diablo III, Blizzard had taken down the Auction House for nearly a week. Though only a few people had the “billions of gold necessary” to make use of the bug, it wrecked havoc on the in-world economy as trillions of duplicated gold was dumped into Diablo III. At this time, 85% of the fraudulent gold has been eliminated, and the 415 accounts who did use the exploit either had their accounts banned or reverted to a state before the 1.08 patch was released, which means they’ve lost all progress since then.
Unfortunately, a good amount of money did change hands because of the exploit, but Blizzard won’t be filling their coffers with it. Instead, they will be donating all proceeds from the suspended/banned players (both the accounts’ proceeds and Blizzard’s transaction fees) to the Children’s Miracle Network Hospital. I’m sure that’s a nice surprise for those folks!
Players who were part of legitimate Auction House transactions on Tuesday before it was taken down should have nothing to fear. Blizzard has stated that those players will be able to keep their items and gold, as well as the money they earned from the real-money Auction House.
