Blizzard bans gold-duping players, gives money to charity

Blizzard has banned all the Diablo 3 players involved with the gold-duping exploit that emerged last week, and will donate all their accumulated funds (from the banned players’ auctions) to charity.

Diablo 3 production director John Hight announced that the company will 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.”

After analysing what happened, Blizzard has revealed that only 415 players took advantage of the exploit for personal gain.

The company also emphasised that all legitimate transactions will follow through as normal.

Blizzard’s 1.0.8 patch for Diablo III initially allowed players to exploit a flaw that let them duplicate gold – this bug was then suggested to be exploitable in the real-money auction house, which then happened.

The bug has been ironed out and all servers are back online.

“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,” added Hight. “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.”