I got a mild cold last week that turned into a moderate sinus infection over the weekend. So that was a good time. As my dad says, “it would have killed an ordinary man.”
- Matthew (RNP)
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Yesterday, an economy-breaking exploit was accidentally introduced into the gold (in-game currency, that is) auction house of Diablo 3. As with every bug, honest mistake, or even well-implemented change, the blizzard forums can be counted on for some of the funniest vitriol on the net. I’ve picked out some choice samples for y’all.
Feel free to skip down to the gallery, but if you need a quick primer on the game or yesterday’s bug:
I don’t play Diablo/any games. What is this about? — Diablo is the kind of game where your worth is your gear. For the vast majority of the players, the point is to hunt or save up for armor and weapon upgrades. Diablo 3 introduced an auction house to the game, and with upgrades found in the wild being very rare for the average player, the auction house became the main path to upgrades for most players. Thing is, they ran auction houses both on gold and real money. So tensions run high over the game’s economy.
I understand about the Diablo auction house, but what exactly happened yesterday? — A pretty minor change to how you sell in-game gold for real money on the auction house was made and it turns out that it caused what seems like an overflow problem on Blizzard’s end of the calculations. By listing 600 billion gold (yeah, in-game currency is sort of crazy) for $0.39 per 10 million and then cancelling the auction immediately, a much greater sum of gold was returned to you. And this could be done as quickly and often as your connection speed allowed.
