Blizzard have brought the North American Diablo 3 auction house back online following a full audit of transactions carried out since the 1.0.8 patch was released earlier this week. The patch introduced a gold duplicating bug which saw some players generating billions of free gold.
Blizzard opted to perform an audit instead of a server rollback as they “didn’t like the idea of punishing [the majority of players] for the bad behavior of a few people”.
In a forum post on Blizzard’s forums, Diablo 3’s production director John Hight explained that “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.”
The auction houses were taken offline and all gold trades were suspended “until we completed a full audit of all transactions that occurred during this period,” Hight said. “Once that was completed, we brought everything back online.”
Depending on the level of their exploit, players found to be guilty of exploiting the bug, and those who helped hold their illicit gains, have had their accounts banned or rolled back.
Blizzard claim to have eliminated 85% of the duplicated gold from the market.