Newsbrief: Following a Diablo III exploit that allowed some players to duplicate gold in-game last week, developer Blizzard Entertainment has made the decision to ban those players who took advantage of the exploit, and donate all their sales proceeds to charity.
Diablo III features a real money-powered auction house within the game, and following the discovery of last week's bug, more than 400 players chose to exploit the issue for potential monetary gain.
However, after closing down the auction house and fixing the exploit, Blizzard has now either banned or rolled back every account involved in the exploit, and donated all proceeds from these auctions to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.
In case you're wondering it states in the agreement that you will be banned if you exploit bugs. On top of this Blizzard have been VERY vocal about this in the past so a player acting like they've been hard done by is just silly.
Plus we're not talking about people giving themselves a couple free weapons, we're talking about people trying to exploit themselves a butt load of cash at the expense of the rest of the player base. It's borderline fraud.
Just to clarify, most if not all of the banned accounts engaged in trades in the RMAH yielding real money gains for the exploiters. Blizzard went in and locked those accounts and seized the real money assets attached to those accounts and donated them to charity. I assume Blizzard was careful enough to put a clause allowing this in the EULA. The type of systemic audit that Blizzard is doing, in lieu of a rollback, is better for the community and while being resource intensive for Blizzard, seems to me to be the best approach if they have the assets to do it.
Plus we're not talking about people giving themselves a couple free weapons, we're talking about people trying to exploit themselves a butt load of cash at the expense of the rest of the player base. It's borderline fraud.