Diablo III’s in-game economy is in serious trouble tonight after users claim to have discovered an exploit in the game’s latest update which lets them duplicate gold.
Seems a glitch is letting people cancel a transaction in the Diablo III auction house before it’s completed, with the result that any money involved is doubled.
The game’s forums are overflowing with users reporting/complaining about the exploit, calling for bans and rollbacks of the update as the instantaneous inflation is destroying Diablo III’s economy.
We’ve contacted Blizzard for comment, and will update if we hear back. Until then, you’re advised to not spend a cent of real money in the auction house until the mess is cleaned up.
Gold Dupe on the RMAH? [Diablo]
Comments
49 responses to “Players Claim Diablo III’s Economy Is In Meltdown”
Good.
Pretty much all I wanted to say.
It’s disrupting the experience for players who enjoy the game. How is that good, exactly?
Because Buzz Killington up there is a douchecanoe.
Because the droves of butthurt players enjoy watching the Titanic sink.
Because it illustrates a[t least one] problem with this type of service, and sets a precedent for why it shouldn’t be done in the future, especially if it leads to game design decisions that make it a virtual necessity on higher difficulties (as it is purported to have done in this case).
I feel for those that were affected by this, but I’m far more concerned about the potential for this “feature” being implemented into other games in the future, or, heaven forbid, become the norm.
There are problems with all software, it’s the nature of the beast. What you’re saying is that because you don’t like the model Blizzard chose for Diablo 3, that you want the model to fail. You’re putting your own wants ahead of the people who are quite happy to enjoy the game the way it is, not the way you wish it was.
Microtransactions are all well and good, if they don’t interfere with good gameplay, but this is rarely the case.
There is an immediate conflict of interest for gameplay to necessitate the use of microtransactions in order for the player to progress, instead of it simply being an option for the lazy.
See os42’s reply to your post for something close enough so I won’t bother typing it up in my own words.
That’s a whole lot of upvotes.
And I agree with you, too.
The abnoxions ‘server/client’ dependancy on the game has been a pain in the ass from day 1.
I’m sure Blizzard had the best of intentions with the whole concept of the AH in D3… but its implementation has sucked since day 1.
I’m not sure Blizzard had the best of intentions. I’m pretty sure a mandate was handed down from on high, and the design team had to try and find a way to make pudding out of shit.
Edit for example:
“Diablo 3! Fuckyeah, I loved Diablo! Getting to work on the sequel is a dream come true!”
“Hey guys. Just thought you should know, the board want this to be Always Online.”
“Sure, I guess we can… wait. Including single-player?”
“Preferably no single player. Social equals retention, equals peer pressure sales. No offline mode equals no piracy. Whatever you gotta do around that, make it happen.”
“Well, we were looking into a way to legitimize some kind of auction house so the closed battle.net players wouldn’t have to go to the black market, but… geez. Putting EVERYONE on it? I have no idea how that’s going to work.”
“Shame it’s your job to figure that out. Anyway, I’m off to play golf. Don’t fuck this up.”
“But… but my dream…”
Activision Blizzard**
Let’s not dwell in the blizzful past.
That is the greatest thing I’ve heard all day.
True. Though I always have to try very hard not to call it ActiBlizzion whenever I sense corporate interference.
It makes me sound like one of those people who still use the word ‘sheeple’ without being ironic. 🙂
(Sheeple, $ony/M$, TORtanic, and fanboy/white knight, and ‘thanks Obama’ are all new indicators of Godwin’s Law, IMO.)
Appears AH has been disabled while they investigate (based on blue post in forum)
So disappointing that what was once arguably the best pc series ever could turn around in almost a instant and become one of the most hated. Grats Blizzard 🙁
Very arguable.
Am I the only one that thinks diablo3 is a great game and love it as much as diablo2? 🙁
The updates they keep doing are just making it better too.
I’ve never used the auction house though- I only like collecting my own gear
Yes, yes you are.
I tried to do that, but after a certain point if you haven’t picked up any upgrades for your class in the last ten or fifteen levels, you hit a gear wall. And the only way past that gear wall is to buy new gear, or grind new gear. And they made grinding the gear painful and boring, and let’s mention boring again because it deserves it. Load map at checkpoint with lots of rare spawns, kill rares, sift through bullshit, sell bullshit/dust for enchants, quit out, load new map, repeat. Except you can’t do that real often anymore because they put a limit on the number of times you can start a new game.
This is the strongest indicator that they don’t want you to grind, they want you to shop. That’s why your drop rate for useful items is so horribly shit.
After I bought a new set of gear from the AH, I went another twenty levels without seeing a single upgrade drop. That’s something broken, right there. If they were to admit the whole thing is a failure and tweak the engine so that something useful to your class/build is more likely to drop, reducing AH reliance, the game would be a whole lot more enjoyable.
This article doesn’t even go into how bad it was… If Blizzard don’t do a server roll back, the economy is dead. People were making billions of gold in seconds, it was estimated someone had managed to make over 300 trillion before Blizzard shut down the RMAH. Gems that were selling for 200 gold skyrockted to 200 million gold, items that were 200 million were now selling for 2 billion.
I did defend Blizzard over the launch of D3, because I still had fun… But this is probably the absolute biggest fuckup to date with the launch of D3, and a fuckup that could actual signal the death toll for this game (I knew several people still actively playing this game, if Blizzard doesn’t do a rollback they won’t continue as the economy has experienced hyper inflation).
Server roll backs especially are the discouraging parts of this game. Firstly, no-one knows when the GMs will approve of a server-wide roll back. And secondly, players won’t even feel like making any progress during this time because of an impending reset on everything they will do. This stops players from playing the game right now, and gives them a window to give up the game for good in the near future.
sounds like the good old gameboy rare candy cloning technique redux, to me
Duplicate gold, you say? In Diablo, you say?
This was no mere bug, it was a dev harking back to the good old days! Drop gold, back up, pick up gold plus an item on belt; rinse and repeat.
Uber Hyper Inflation….the super rich get even richer, the rich get poor and the poor get even poorer.
Ha! Take that ‘the rich’!
In a way, im kind of glad. Over the last few months some of the WoW devs have pointed to Diablo as an example of what not to do when it comes to real money influencing game mechanics. Its too late for Diablo, but its comforting to know that WoW, and eventually Titan, wont make the same mistakes.
What?? People still play this game??? Intriguing
I know – it’s still installed but I haven’t bothered botting it up in months.
Heh. My brother and I were chatting on Steam last weekend, and in a bout of ennui he was like, “Man… I dunno what to play. Nothing’s really tickling my fancy. Maybe I’ll fire up Diablo.”
Timestamp two minutes later: “Yeah. No. I loaded it up then realized how it plays and stared down the barrel of the same grind and the enthusiasm drained out of me like [COLOURFUL ANALOGY].”
I think you mean [COLOURFUL SIMILE].
Seriously, why does everyone shit on DIII all the time like it’s some long-running meme? Sure, I played it and it didn’t turn out to be my cup of tea, but why do y’all have to be such dicks about it like it shattered the dreams of millions of homeless children or something? Jesus.
Welcome to the Gen Y gaming community…. Like what I like or else motherfucker!
But every game is shit and they should have listened to me in my forum posts when developing any game ever!
If that were true you would see this kind of hatred for games like Tomb Raider, Hitman, Far Cry 3/Blood Dragon but you dont, you only see this kind of hatred for games like D3 and Sim City which are perfectly happy to shit on their own customers.
It has little to do with the actual content of the game and everything to do with the business decisions around it. The failure of this game would be a minor victory for everyone who cares about the direction the game industry is going in.
You may be happy with a future full of pay to win, unfinished, always online games full of micro transactions but some of us preferred when the game you bought was the game you got.
Justify it however you like, but it’s not a ‘win’ for anyone if the game fails. Not every game is made for your specific tastes, and it shouldn’t even need to be said that if you don’t like it, don’t buy it and don’t support it. There’s nothing wrong with diversity, and while I certainly understand your concern that that kind of business model will take over and cut out all the old school style of games, you’re doing the same thing by hoping to suppress this style of game.
There’s a world of difference between not supporting a game you don’t like and wishing for it to fail. Why not hope for a balance of all kinds of games, with models you like and models you don’t like? At least that way, people who do like the D3 model can have it, and you can have the model you like.
I just don’t buy what you are saying, In my opinion there are 2 people who play Diablo 3, Those who like the game and hate the business decisions around it and those who like the game and never gave a thought about the business decisions.
Nobody likes being screwed over. If the game is a failure it would simply mean that blizzard may turn off their servers and stop supporting it.
This itself would show the players who never gave a thought to the business decisions the reason why they should start paying attention. Sooner or later Blizzard will stop supporting the game one way or another so they WILL lose the product they paid for.
If enough games like this fail we will be back to a state where people can play any game they want no matter how small the player base is without fear of losing access when the company decides its not profitable anymore.
There are certainly people outside of your two types that play (or played) D3, because I was one of them, and many of my friends that I played with were of the same mind. I like the game, I’m fully aware of the business model behind it and it doesn’t bother me. It’s there if I want to use it and if I don’t want to use it I don’t have to. It’s simply not the drastic End Of The Gaming World scenario that you fear it to be. It’s cool that you found parts of the game disappointing – I didn’t like the fact ‘always online’ wasn’t a choice, even though I personally would have always chosen to play online anyway, like I did in D2 – and I get that this was a game a lot of people were excited for and then felt let down when it wasn’t to their taste.
But that’s really what it is in the end – it wasn’t to your taste. Modern military shooters aren’t to my taste, and I loathe Zynga as a company and all of its games as money-sucking garbage. And sometimes I do wish Zynga would collapse and take its garbage with it, but that’s not fair on the people who like those games.
We’re dealing with an industry that is vastly larger than the one you and I grew up with. As it expands, there are going to be more and more games that aren’t in a style we like or agree with. I want to preserve core gaming as much as you do, but warring against the emergence of alternative systems or revenue models is wasted effort, because for every person making a lot of noise that they don’t like the D3 RMAH, there are three more people happily using it.
There are battles that absolutely should be fought, but not at the expense of others. Fight to protect diversity and make sure the type of game we like doesn’t disappear, don’t fight to shut out a type of game others like just because you or I don’t.
hear hear!
I think this game plays people
The Real Money Auction House (RMAH) was one of the biggest banes of this game. Even on the day it came out things already started going haywire; useless cheeseburger “daggers” were being sold for $250 USD out of “excitement”. The D3 economy was never stable because of the introduction of a second form of currency.
I stopped playing the game a long time ago, and seeing this problem makes me feel like it was an issue that surfaced when I had stopped playing; I doubt the game ever became “good” or “fixed” in the last 9 months. Glad I never went back to find out what things are like now.
May serve as a testimony to those waiting on SimCity to get better, it probably won’t, ever.
Useless items were being listed for the max price, few if any were actually sold. But even if they were, that negatively affects you how? Both auction houses are and always have been optional, you never had to use them. ‘But you did have to use them because on higher difficulties some parts were impossible to get past without bought gear’ is a cop out excuse, Diablo is and always was about the grind – put the time in, get the rare drops, push further into the higher difficulties.
Have you not played Diablo 2 or something? I used to get at least a half dozen unique or set items per few hours of playing, always something interesting even though only every now and then it was a good upgrade for me. In D3 I only saw 2 legendary items in like 100 hours of playing (most the way through nightmare twice). Until I logged into the auction house that is, and found infinity of everything. The game is broken as all heck, disliking it is not about it ‘not being my kind of game’, it’s because it IS my kind of game, and a sequel to one of my all time favourites, but being a dismal failure and a massive disappointment.
Diablo 3’s grind was so much worse than Diablo 2’s ever was. That’s the problem, that’s how it affects everyone. The whole model is to make people use the AH, so that they’ll spend money, and BlizzActi will make money. If (good) items were more common, people would be less inclined to spend money buying things.
let it burn
people still play that crappy game??… it was good before real money… now its just pay, and we will make u good. stupid ass game….
“Until then, you’re advised to not spend a cent of real money in the auction house”
Hahahahaha – good one!! Wait – you’re serious? People use the RMAH?
Sorry console n00b here: You’ve already bought the game, what are spending more money on?
Im going to humour your question and try to explain.
Think of it like day one DLC for consoles, you are not required to purchase it, but by buying it you would get so-called “extra” features that was “developed” after the game goes Gold
Including better armour or better weapons for your in-game characters
The only shit thing is, in diablo3, it become so much as a paywall that either you pay or you cant progress.
Wait…i just describe the candy crush saga annoying life up through facebook…shit…
Alas, im sure even on consoles next generation you will be getting this kind of nonsense :*(
Soon you too will be able to pay to win!
It really is a brave new world.
If I were a developer of games I promise none of my games will have any of these pay to win, always online for a single player game, questionable revenue stream shenannigans!
*10 years later*
Nanotransations hell yea! We’ll make they pay for every step they take automatically from their ultra-credit cards!
The Blizzard forums are down when I try to follow the link in the article.
“The Blizzard family of websites is currently undergoing maintenance to improve your browsing experience. Thank you for your patience!”
Intradesting
Blizzard were just jealous of Maxis getting all the attention, recently.