It may have been an unfortunate turn of events, but the exploit discovered in Diablo 3 last week that allowed players to add a new, unearned chunk of cash to their existing funds has actually lead to some good. Although some players will be banned for attempting to break the game’s solid economy, all of the profits made during last week’s incident will be donated to charity.
The problem started after the official launch of the 1.0.8. patch, which had been tested for quite some time. Some adventurers had discovered a way to add trillions of gold to their total through an auction-house oversight, and while the developers solved the problem in a short period of time, the real-money features of the game were left offline for a few days.
“For those just tuning in, we decided to perform a complete audit and focus on the few players that exploited this bug rather than performing a full rollback and taking everyone offline for a day (or more) – losing all the progress they made,” read an official statement.
However, everything is resolved now, and Blizzard has managed to identify 415 players who took advantage of the gold exploit. The company will decide whether to ban them or give them access to their account on a case-by-case basis.
"Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We're making sure that all legitimate transactions go through," Blizzard said. "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.”
Instead of simply writing this off as a bad week for the action RPG, the bright minds behind Diablo 3 have decided to do some good with all the dirty gold created through the exploit. The money that once belonged to banned players will find a new home at a charity.
"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."
Along with this PC release, Diablo 3 will also be finding a home on the PlayStation 4.
