Blizzard pull Diablo 3 auction house offline after gold duping bug shakes in-game economy
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Diablo’s 1.0.8 patch went live yesterday, implementing some of the changes Blizzard have mused aloud about in recent weeks - magic and gold find bonuses when playing co-op, for instance, and notifications in multiplayer for Elite monster encounters. But it also introduced something entirely unexpected - a gold duping bug that saw some players acquire billions in a matter of hours. Blizzard promptly shut down the Diablo auction house in response, and have already plugged the leak - but refused player calls for a global rollback.
Diablo 3’s gold and real-money auction houses have long been a bone of contention for the playerbase. But in 
Scammers have been exploiting the auction house’s automatic price-setting mechanism to buy gems from unsuspecting Diablo 3 players for amounts far below their actual value.
The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post is now open for business, throwing open the doors of the MMO's auction house to players across all servers. It had been off-limits to many players during the game's opening week — in which it 
Throwing open Diablo 3 players' wardrobes to the public with the new 
Anybody who's used Diablo 3's auction house enough will be aware of the painfully limited search filters available for players looking to find equipment with preferred stats (read "players"). No longer! A Blizzard community manager's confirmed that they'll be bumping the number of auction house filters from three to six in a coming update, allowing bargain hunters to be extremely precise in their searches. This might not sound like a big deal, but Diablo 3 players have been demanding this change for months. Months! It's one of the very few changes everybody agrees needs to be made, and it's finally arriving.
No fewer than two merry little exploits are currently stinking up the Diablo 3 auction house. The first is a bug that, by fiddling with chat windows, allows you to see precisely how many special properties an unidentified item has. This matters because it allows unscrupulous auction house sellers to pawn off their weak unidentified items while identifying and selling their more powerful items as normal. In short, as the 
Last Friday, three hours after Diablo 3's real money auction house launched, the average buyout price of a Horadric Hamburger stood at an initial high of £87.91. Today that number has fallen to just £7.50, a market decline of 91%. The once saturated hamburger economy, it seems, is shrinking rapidly.
