Blizzard Punishes Players for Diablo III Glitch Abuse

I found this interesting article today:

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/blizzard-donates-money-diablo-iii-glitch-charity-174850228.html

Basically, Blizzard discovered a glitch in-game this weekend that allows players to duplicate gold. Not a problem, right? Wrong. Diablo III is one of the few games online that has a virtual market called an "auction house." It is the same as the Team Fortress 2's "Hatconomy" where hats and metal have real-world money value attached to them. 1-million gold in Diablo III has a value of $0.25 USD. If you were to duplicate 1-million gold, then do it again and again, your prices would be:

1st time: $0.25
2nd time: $0.50
3rd time: $1.00
4th time: $2.00
5th time: $4.00
6th time: $8.00
7th time: $16.00
8th time: $32.00
9th time: $64.00
10 time: $128.00

After a few times abusing this glitch, you can make $128. Do this 3 more times, and you will have $1,024 real world money that is created through the game.

What Blizzard has done was deflate the price of gold to 10 million gold for $0.25. Making it ten times less valuable; and banning 415 players for abusing this glitch. All the money confiscated through this is being donated to a local hospital under Blizzard's name. Do you think this issue was handled properly?

Ah, the power of glitches! I can't really think of another effective way to handle the situation. It's also nice that they donated the funds to charity, it just would've been nice to know how much they donated I hope the bans are not permanent, though. Of all the people who used the glitch, I doubt many would've traded in the currency for cash.

well what about the people who earned their gold properly? i assume the price goes up for them as well

True story bro.

gamerectangle wrote:

well what about the people who earned their gold properly? i assume the price goes up for them as well

I bet Blizzard took the time to look at all the transaction history and filter out the legitimate trades from the ones just duplicating gold. Unfortunately, they still had to nerf the value of gold by 1,000%. It just means because the 2% of the gaming community cheated, everyone suffers.