THE DOOMSDAY WAS A NA ONLY EVENT, MUCH LIKE HOLLYWOOD HAD PREDICTED
How come there are no topics about this here yet?!? No NA players here?
Basically the 1.0.8 killed Diablo 3, or at least it's economy.
It all happened because of a gold dupe glitch on the rmah, people were getting trillions of gold out of this. The situation got out of control once the dupers started to buy everything on the gah, mainly radian stars, making their prices skyrocket from 20m to some 150-200m. Non dupers started to exploit this by buying gems cheap in the rmah and then selling it by 150m in the gah, getting HUGE profits.
Wanted to hear TL's ideas on this. Do you guys believe in any way to solve the problem? Is a global rollback the only way to solve this? Is the 5-7-2013 the biggest videogame fiasco of all time?
My 2 cents: Blizz will rollback the NA server.. unless they are ready to give up Diablo 3.
UPDATE 5-8-2013 Blue post: "At this time (and after careful consideration), we've decided to not move forward with rolling back the servers. We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it, and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region. We've been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections. While this is a time-consuming and very detailed process, we believe it's the most appropriate choice given the circumstances. We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."
Seems like NA SC is dead. Any ideas on how much data Blizzard has? and if it is even possible to just "rollback" the duped gold transactions? I mean, lots of people sold items to the dupers, if only the dupers get banned/rolledback, the damage is still HUGE!
Poll: Will D3 NA SC economy ever recover?
BYE BYE D3! (62)
72%
No, too much duped gold was distributed legally and pricves will never lower again (14)
16%
Yes, Blizz will fix it by removing the duped gold entirely (7)
8%
Yes, the amount of duped gold was not significative (3)
3%
86 total votes
Your vote: Will D3 NA SC economy ever recover?
(Vote): Yes, Blizz will fix it by removing the duped gold entirely (Vote): Yes, the amount of duped gold was not significative (Vote): No, too much duped gold was distributed legally and pricves will never lower again (Vote): BYE BYE D3!
Wasn't there a gold glitch that happened a year ago? I remember the issue was that the AH was based off the local time on the PC instead of the server time, people just rewound their time on their PC and somehow they got their money back with the item too.
On May 08 2013 14:02 Zariel wrote: Wasn't there a gold glitch that happened a year ago? I remember the issue was that the AH was based off the local time on the PC instead of the server time, people just rewound their time on their PC and somehow they got their money back with the item too.
I believe you are right, but this time the glitch took HUGE proportions. Every single player made some money and some gold. Some got well over 100b.
On May 08 2013 14:02 Zariel wrote: Wasn't there a gold glitch that happened a year ago? I remember the issue was that the AH was based off the local time on the PC instead of the server time, people just rewound their time on their PC and somehow they got their money back with the item too.
On May 08 2013 14:02 Zariel wrote: Wasn't there a gold glitch that happened a year ago? I remember the issue was that the AH was based off the local time on the PC instead of the server time, people just rewound their time on their PC and somehow they got their money back with the item too.
I would bet anything they'll do some combination of rollback/ban/restitution. From what I've been seeing on the us.battle.net forums, looks like the gold has been staying since the server's have been back up, though AH remains down. Still thinking about it? Sounds like they are.
On May 08 2013 14:02 Zariel wrote: Wasn't there a gold glitch that happened a year ago? I remember the issue was that the AH was based off the local time on the PC instead of the server time, people just rewound their time on their PC and somehow they got their money back with the item too.
Fair enough. It still wouldn't have taken more than 30 minutes to make that much, so I'm in no doubt that there's people going around with similar amounts. Pretty funny that Blizzard's taking their time to verify the legitimacy of a screenshot as opposed to rectify the catastrophic state of their economy.
On May 08 2013 14:19 Shrubbles wrote: 371t gold, before ah got shut down gold was selling for about 30cents/10m
Some calculations:
371t/10m=371m 371m*0.30= 11,130,000.00 dollars
Some crazy shit in here!
Your math is a little off
371t/10m = 37.1m
Still ~$1 million USD worth of gold though.
He missed the decimal but got the dollar value right. 37.1 * .3 = $11,130,000 Even at off the market prices its still $5.5 million
The method was really ridiculously simple though, so I imagine tons of people had that amount. The requirements for it were kind of high though, at 6billion gold. List 6billion for $.39 and some reason the game listed 1.7 billion or something. So when you cancelled you got an extra 4.3 billion. Dunno if there were other multiples that this worked with.
You can also make huge profit on EU by buying Radiant Star on RMAH for ~0.70€, selling them for gold on AH (~20M gold) then selling the gold on RMAH, dunno if it's allowed by Blizzard though so I never tried.
yeah i was surprised there was no thread about this.. i didn't dupe any gold but i did sell my gems when the prices were skyrocketing. i suppose a rollback is in order but part of me hopes it can be resolved otherwise because i crafted some good stuff today
On May 08 2013 18:45 Lylat wrote: You can also make huge profit on EU by buying Radiant Star on RMAH for ~0.70€, selling them for gold on AH (~20M gold) then selling the gold on RMAH, dunno if it's allowed by Blizzard though so I never tried.
you have to get very lucky to sell the gold on the RMAH, because there is a lot more gold than buyers and there is still a price cap (right? stopped playing a while back).
i'm "happy" this didn't happen to EU where i play but poor US folks. They NEED to do a rollback, absolute must, if they don't........................ Goodbye AH
No roll back or massive indiscriminate ban wave, just no AH and a bunch of locked accounts that will be individually modified/rolledback, hopefully with a minimal effect on the economy.
The 1.08 changes even without the dupe would have messed things up - massive buff to quantity of drops available to the average player (anyone and their brother using a 5m gold 1k dps ls/cd/os sword to do MP10), and lowering of the gold price would have done it already.
They are saying they can track every trade and account that have been doing the dupe, so a rollback isnt needed, since they also want people to keep their progress in the new patch.
So every duped gold transaction will be reverted, so the dupers cant stash gold on other accounts. Not to mention, there will several bans handed out. Alot of people want a rollback, since they feel it the most reliable, but if they actually can revert every duped gold, then thats the best option.
That being said, I feel sorry for the NA people. Im soooo happy that the asian and NA servers act as a buffer for the EU O_o
Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
^ this may or may not have been me
This is why a complete rollback is needed, every single player, to pre-patch day. Not everyone is guilty, but the gold is dirty and ruins the economy greatly.
Even the innocent people are partly guilty, as anyone with >2 brain cells knows that radiants suddenly going from 20m to 150m in the space of 1 hour isn't normal, and it wasn't even specifically radiants, every 'good' item jumped in price by 1000% from what im told.
The economy for sc has been ruined for quite some time.
I hate to be one of those "ladder" people, but honestly this is why the game needs ladder seasons, the longer the game goes on the more fucked the economy will continue to get.
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
Apparently it was something ridiculous like just put anything more than 43 billion gold for sale on the RMAH and then cancel it and you get double back, but I didn't look to much in to it. That's my understanding from listening to a streamer.
I cant believe they arent going forward with a US server rollback. The game is ruined for NA players. Sure it would suck to lose 12 hours of progress but the economy is worthless now.
Last time I raised the point about ladders on the TL forums my head got verbally blown off but...
The SC economy is ruined, imho it was ruined before this. It's just getting worse and worse for new players, the time has come for a new (seperate) ladder.
The best a good willing person can say about Blizzard and Diablo3 is that hopefully they got all their urges to fail out of their system and the rest of the games will really be what we thought of as 'Blizzard quality' games.
I mean, all the jokes referred to the game as an economy simulator and now even that is gone :p
On May 09 2013 00:24 Taguchi wrote: The best a good willing person can say about Blizzard and Diablo3 is that hopefully they got all their urges to fail out of their system and the rest of the games will really be what we thought of as 'Blizzard quality' games.
I mean, all the jokes referred to the game as an economy simulator and now even that is gone :p
What do you mean, the economy completely crashed, it's an even more realistic simulator! :p
Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
I really don't think it'll be that bad. No one with half a brain is going to trade away their hard earned HC gold for dirt. The ratio people are willing to trade at will increase dramatically.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
HC gold doesn't materialize out of thin air. In order to trade SC gold for HC gold someone needs to trade HC gold they already posses for SC gold. They just now have to pay more SC gold for the equivalent amount of HC gold. None of this duped gold is getting into HC just existing gold moving from one owner to another.
I myself have some gold that came from dupers, I sold some radiant gems and got from 50m to 500m in like 30 minutes.
This gold is still in my stash as I write this...
What I'm afraid of is that the global inflation is even bigger than the inflation I had. I went from 50m to 500m so I had my gold multiplied by 10. I would dare saying that the overall available gold, that is now on legit players hands, has been multiplied by something between 15 and 30.
What that means? I have just became 1.5 to 3 times poorer than I was (relatively speaking). I'm very much worried about the game at this point.
On May 09 2013 02:50 Shrubbles wrote: I myself have some gold that came from dupers, I sold some radiant gems and got from 50m to 500m in like 30 minutes.
This gold is still in my stash as I write this...
What I'm afraid of is that the global inflation is even bigger than the inflation I had. I went from 50m to 500m so I had my gold multiplied by 10. I would dare saying that the overall available gold, that is now on legit players hands, has been multiplied by something between 15 and 30.
What that means? I have just became 1.5 to 3 times poorer than I was (relatively speaking). I'm very much worried about the game at this point.
And everyone that didn't capitalize on it at all, got 15 to 30 times poorer. GG.
On May 09 2013 02:50 Shrubbles wrote: I myself have some gold that came from dupers, I sold some radiant gems and got from 50m to 500m in like 30 minutes.
This gold is still in my stash as I write this...
What I'm afraid of is that the global inflation is even bigger than the inflation I had. I went from 50m to 500m so I had my gold multiplied by 10. I would dare saying that the overall available gold, that is now on legit players hands, has been multiplied by something between 15 and 30.
What that means? I have just became 1.5 to 3 times poorer than I was (relatively speaking). I'm very much worried about the game at this point.
And everyone that didn't capitalize on it at all, got 15 to 30 times poorer. GG.
Yes, I just wanted to point out that even the people that did sell some gems, they may think they are rich now, but in reality they are probably poorer. I have been playing public games today (because of the xp bonu, great change) and have been encountering lots and lots and lots of god-mode barbs with almost 400k damage, with gear that was worth at least 20b till yesterday.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
No, that's not how it works. There's still the same amount of HC gold, trading gold over doesn't change the amount of gold in the HC economy - it simply makes it change hands.
why do you people who didn't dupe yourselves but got duped gold in a trade or took advantage of the situation think that when you log in tomorrow or whenever that you won't find that blizz has cleaned out your gold and/or items?
blizzard can basically do whatever they want with your character, if they want to take the time and effort to clean up every piece of duped gold and every item acquired during that time period they can. and then people will be complaining about blizz being unfair and heavy-handed instead of acting too lightly.
blizzard isn't just going to abandon diablo3 NA when an expansion is surely going to be coming out someday.
I'm REALLY, REALLY surprised they aren't going to do a roll back. Unless they do something drastic about this the already bad economy is going to be completely fucked, and people like me who didn't know/take advantage of this get screwed over hard...
EG today on a financial system we were doing an analysis on a 8 digit double floating point number to figure out is the error in its innacuracy would be significant in the figures we care about.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
No, that's not how it works. There's still the same amount of HC gold, trading gold over doesn't change the amount of gold in the HC economy - it simply makes it change hands.
this is not true
Real Money is simply an intermediary currency such as bit coins might be.
The fact is people fund real money transactions through SC abuse (ie for free) which are then passed in HC transactions for the intermediary currency.
the reason why it isd a concern is that people without real money to spend all of a sudden do have due to duping.
It wont bea major deal but some of the money in HC will now be dirty money.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
No, that's not how it works. There's still the same amount of HC gold, trading gold over doesn't change the amount of gold in the HC economy - it simply makes it change hands.
this is not true
Real Money is simply an intermediary currency such as bit coins might be.
The fact is people fund real money transactions through SC abuse (ie for free) which are then passed in HC transactions for the intermediary currency.
the reason why it isd a concern is that people without real money to spend all of a sudden do have due to duping.
It wont bea major deal but some of the money in HC will now be dirty money.
Zero dirty money enters the HC economy. Some dirty players will buy up HC gold, but that in itself doesn't create HC gold. Someone in HC has to trade HC gold created without the duping for the dirty SC money. So no the HC economy is not changed.
On May 09 2013 02:03 Eschaton wrote: Glad I've completely stopped playing softcore, game is completely ruined after this. At this point it's likely I will give up HC as well, as the abundant gold now present in SC can be traded for HC gold. Like it or not, the economies are linked and if SC is lolfucked so is HC.
No, that's not how it works. There's still the same amount of HC gold, trading gold over doesn't change the amount of gold in the HC economy - it simply makes it change hands.
this is not true
Real Money is simply an intermediary currency such as bit coins might be.
The fact is people fund real money transactions through SC abuse (ie for free) which are then passed in HC transactions for the intermediary currency.
the reason why it isd a concern is that people without real money to spend all of a sudden do have due to duping.
It wont bea major deal but some of the money in HC will now be dirty money.
Except there's still a finite amount of HC gold that can be obtained, and that amount does not change even if gold is duped on softcore. It's not like people with softcore gold can use their softcore gold to create hardcore gold, it still has to be given to them by someone with legitimate hardcore gold.
I think what he is getting at is that the best way to accumulate HC gold will be to have duped/laundered trillions of SC gold then trade at whatever ratio you can get. The people with the most HC gold/gear will be those who exploited on SC.
On May 09 2013 08:06 el_dawg wrote: I think what he is getting at is that the best way to accumulate HC gold will be to have duped/laundered trillions of SC gold then trade at whatever ratio you can get. The people with the most HC gold/gear will be those who exploited on SC.
The thing is you have to go out of your way to trade SC gold to HC gold. Most people who are willing to do that will know that the value of SC gold took a nose dive. There'll be a few people that grab more HC gold than others but in the bigger picture it's not like trillions of gold will be injected into the HC market. If the SC economy gets destroyed from this people who want to trade SC for HC gold will be doing it at a different ratio.
Ex. prior to 1.08 it was 4 to 1, SC to HC
After the SC economy gets wrecked people will have to pay 30 (made up #) to 1 SC to HC.
Some people may be able to cash in and get ahead but honestly, they'll buy their crazy items and then the economy will go back to being stable because there isn't a massive jump in the gold available. Worst case scenario is the HC gold gets shifted around temporarily.
On May 09 2013 08:06 el_dawg wrote: I think what he is getting at is that the best way to accumulate HC gold will be to have duped/laundered trillions of SC gold then trade at whatever ratio you can get. The people with the most HC gold/gear will be those who exploited on SC.
The thing is you have to go out of your way to trade SC gold to HC gold. Most people who are willing to do that will know that the value of SC gold took a nose dive. There'll be a few people that grab more HC gold than others but in the bigger picture it's not like trillions of gold will be injected into the HC market. If the SC economy gets destroyed from this people who want to trade SC for HC gold will be doing it at a different ratio.
Ex. prior to 1.08 it was 4 to 1, SC to HC
After the SC economy gets wrecked people will have to pay 30 (made up #) to 1 SC to HC.
Some people may be able to cash in and get ahead but honestly, they'll buy their crazy items and then the economy will go back to being stable because there isn't a massive jump in the gold available. Worst case scenario is the HC gold gets shifted around temporarily.
TL;DR last paragraph is most important.
I wrote that first post after waking up this morning and seeing the "meh, you fucks that still play our game can sort yourselves, we aren't doing anything" blue post, and probably overreacted a bit in saying that the HC economy would also be ruined. However, el_dawg pretty much nailed what I am actually concerned about. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of HC players know that jsp is the place to trade items/gold, and so it's not necessarily as "out of the way" as you say. Someone with a trilliion SC gold might be able to hoover up a large amount of the available HC gold and items by trading, but I think they won't for the following reason: HC players will want SC gold even less than they used to, as it is now completely and utterly useless, and no one will be willing to trade. I am sure some big trades will happen, but it probably won't have a very noticeable effect on the overall HC economy.
After thinking about this a bit more, I now think that even if I was not entirely incorrect in stating that the HC and SC economies are linked, they now will be completely unlinked. The link depends on HC players desiring SC gold, and as stated above, this will no longer be true. It used to be viable to get some HC gold, trade it for a large amount of SC, and sell that on RMAH; this will never happen again. It's possible this is actually good for HC, as it will bring in new blood and sever the link to SC.
Haha. I checked that "d3_inigomontoya" stream. He fit my stereotype of a cheater exactly. What a fucking loser. He seems to be hiding his face on his stream behind a hat, glasses and some dollar bills! Couldn't get funnier.
On May 09 2013 13:34 Sufficiency wrote: It is absolutely beyond me as to why Blizzard wouldn't reroll the server.
I don't want to believe that it is because of all the money they made off the rmah spike. The more I think about it, the more this seems to be the only explanation.
Just to be moderately fair, it may be possible for them do to a recursive trace of the "paper trail" of duped gold, and undo all of those transactions specifically.
Of course, given the history of D3, I highly doubt it.
On May 09 2013 13:34 Sufficiency wrote: It is absolutely beyond me as to why Blizzard wouldn't reroll the server.
I don't want to believe that it is because of all the money they made off the rmah spike. The more I think about it, the more this seems to be the only explanation.
I can only imagine this is the case. If they do rollback, it would be a mind boggling task as to how the real money purchases can be reimbursed.
On May 09 2013 13:34 Sufficiency wrote: It is absolutely beyond me as to why Blizzard wouldn't reroll the server.
I don't want to believe that it is because of all the money they made off the rmah spike. The more I think about it, the more this seems to be the only explanation.
I didn't consider all those $1's blizzard would have gotten from this.. really low from Blizzard if that has ANY bearing on their decision here.
On May 09 2013 13:34 Sufficiency wrote: It is absolutely beyond me as to why Blizzard wouldn't reroll the server.
I don't want to believe that it is because of all the money they made off the rmah spike. The more I think about it, the more this seems to be the only explanation.
I didn't consider all those $1's blizzard would have gotten from this.. really low from Blizzard if that has ANY bearing on their decision here.
Low or not, the fact is all those $1's could very well equal an amount that Blizzard does not want to roll back. Unfortunately doing it manually seems to be the only way to get rid of the bigger offenders to clean up the game a bit, and the damage done will eventually settle, Like it or not, all this duping was just digital gold in a game. Either way Blizzard is making real money.
Hahaha x) Oh I love how D3 is an amazing provider of entertainment, so long after I quit the game. Actually had more fun with it, since I stopped playing x)
I haven't been playing/following D3, but I can assume that if they aren't rolling back, they're certainly able to track the gold trail and remove all of that which was spontaneously created. This takes time, but it seems like they are capable to do-so.
On May 09 2013 19:29 Xapti wrote: I haven't been playing/following D3, but I can assume that if they aren't rolling back, they're certainly able to track the gold trail and remove all of that which was spontaneously created. This takes time, but it seems like they are capable to do-so.
I dunno, the way I see it, it's like dropping ten million dollar bills off the top of the empire state, then coming back in a weeks time to reclaim them all, and having to track them down.
It seems impossible, the money could have changed so many hands.
On May 09 2013 19:29 Xapti wrote: I haven't been playing/following D3, but I can assume that if they aren't rolling back, they're certainly able to track the gold trail and remove all of that which was spontaneously created. This takes time, but it seems like they are capable to do-so.
They are obviously not tracking the gold. Otherwise they would have just rolled the server back.
What I see (from an outsider's point of view who does not play Blizzard games anymore) is the following:
Blizzard considered the following:
Rollback Positives: + minimize server damage/damage to economy + avoid shitstorm
Rollback Negatives: - Hard to deal with real-money purchase during the "dupe" peroid - there will be a shitstorm regardless
The way I see it, if I was the leading developer of a NEW game company and this happened, I would have rolled back the server, and compensated every player who bought items during the "dupe" period. It would be costly, but one of my major objectives for the new company is brand-building.
But of course, Blizzard's objective with D3 isn't brand-building (Blizzard has plenty already) - it is to milk the franchise.
On May 09 2013 19:29 Xapti wrote: I haven't been playing/following D3, but I can assume that if they aren't rolling back, they're certainly able to track the gold trail and remove all of that which was spontaneously created. This takes time, but it seems like they are capable to do-so.
They are obviously not tracking the gold. Otherwise they would have just rolled the server back.
What I see (from an outsider's point of view who does not play Blizzard games anymore) is the following:
Blizzard considered the following:
Rollback Positives: + minimize server damage/damage to economy + avoid shitstorm
Rollback Negatives: - Hard to deal with real-money purchase during the "dupe" peroid - there will be a shitstorm regardless
The way I see it, if I was the leading developer of a NEW game company and this happened, I would have rolled back the server, and compensated every player who bought items during the "dupe" period. It would be costly, but one of my major objectives for the new company is brand-building.
But of course, Blizzard's objective with D3 isn't brand-building (Blizzard has plenty already) - it is to milk the franchise.
Yup, they don't have to worry about brand building yet. Millions of people still buy their games based off the old Blizzard's reputation. No sense in costing themselves money yet, wait until you run the franchise into the ground by producing fast, low quality, glitchy games, then eventually in a few years they might have to make a decent product.
For those of you wondering what exactly went down, there's a nice reddit post which I will shamelessly quote:
Since Blizzard has posted that they have fixed the bug and are just cleaning things up now, I wanted to share what I think caused it.
The gold "dupe" involved creating a RMAH auction for billions of gold while staying under the $250 limit. The example I saw in a video was 6 billion gold (600 x 10,000,000 at $0.39 per stack, for $234). When they posted this auction only ~1.7 billion appeared to be for sale, with the rest "missing" until they sent it to their stash and ended up with more than they started with. The exact numbers from a duping video:
Create RMAH auction for: 6,000,000,000 gold Auction shows up as: 1,705,032,704 gold This much is missing! 4,294,967,296 gold The missing amount, divided by 2: 2,147,483,648 gold
Simply put, their RMAH gold selling code wasn't written to handle numbers over 2,147,483,648 properly, and the result was duplicate gold being added to people's stashes.
How could something this basic make it to live? I think it was coded at the last minute and not really tested. The final patch was version 1.0.8.16416, while the last PTR notes were for 1.0.8.16256. That last PTR version, 1.0.8.16256 from April 23, had no mention of changing the gold stack size on the RMAH from 1mil to 10mil. The final version two weeks later on May 7 had the change.
Sometime in the last two weeks they made changes to the gold selling code. As far as I can tell the change never made it to the PTR, and selling over 2.1 billion gold was never tested internally (it should have been!), so it shipped with the 1.08 patch. Since the RMAH was originally coded to only sell stacks of 100,000 gold, there was probably some old Int32 code left written when the idea of buying and selling billions of gold in one transaction was unfathomable.
Am I the only one who actually thinks they made the right decision by not doing a rollback, and not that they did it for their own benefit?
I mean really guys, doing it for RMAH profit? The amount blizz made on RMAH in that one day is a drop in the ocean of their company and its reputation.
On May 10 2013 23:56 Pokebunny wrote: Am I the only one who actually thinks they made the right decision by not doing a rollback, and not that they did it for their own benefit?
I mean really guys, doing it for RMAH profit? The amount blizz made on RMAH in that one day is a drop in the ocean of their company and its reputation.
They would have upset a lot of people who effectively played for a day for nothing sure, but now there is just so much dirty gold floating around the economy. There is no way they can trace all of it, and even if they could, it would only be punishing innocent people who somehow found it in their possession, be it from gem sales for example.
On May 10 2013 23:56 Pokebunny wrote: Am I the only one who actually thinks they made the right decision by not doing a rollback, and not that they did it for their own benefit?
No, I agree. But then I don't play softcore, and I found the Witching Hour I always wanted on patch day.
I almost feel like they need to make a d4 just to make sure the diablo franchise doesn't end with all the horrific failures of d3. This game has failed from day 1 when people installed the game
If Blizzard rolls the server back wouldn't they have to refund EVERY rmah purchase during the period of the roll back? Not only would Blizzard lose out on their profits from the rmah but wouldn't they also suffer the severe issue of reversing the transactions of real dollars $$$ between players! Any REAL money spent on items in the rmah would be lost if they didn't do that which would have real world consequences and probable law suits.
EG - say I spent $20 on items in the rmah during this crisis and blizzard decides to go ahead with a sever rollback. I would lose everything I purchased. How would I get my $20 back? Blizzard won't absorb those losses because of the all mighty dollar. And when enough players get pissed off that they were robbed of their money because of the server rollback you would get lawsuits against blizzard. Blizzard has been dealt an ugly hand and they are screwed no matter how they go about fixing this. They will choose the path that is the least expensive because when blizzard created the rmah they made a deal with the devil.
It sounded like transactions during that time weren't fully approved and that people who made purchases saw their paypal accounts refunded. There is a 24 hour wait time for paypal and the RMAH.
It would have been easiest to just shut down the servers and do a rollback the moment they decided to shut down the AH, but it's way to late for that now, hopefully they can track down all the laundered gold.
Even then, there's no way they can take gold from people who profited legitimately from emerald sales. They saw the economy was crashing and they took advantage of it. They haven't done anything wrong. That gold's going nowhere.
On May 11 2013 02:29 Teliko wrote: Even then, there's no way they can take gold from people who profited legitimately from emerald sales. They saw the economy was crashing and they took advantage of it. They haven't done anything wrong. That gold's going nowhere.
Why not? They can always reverse those transactions as well, just like any other transactions, unless the gold has been spent. Maybe something as simple as "if a transection is > 1M, reverse". Take away the gold, and give the players the emeralds back. Whether a rollback would have been an easier solution, I do not know. But both of these have their drawbacks.
I actually don't mind too much. Everything else about this patch was fantastic. If prices go up a ton or something, it's not the end of the world imho.
On May 11 2013 04:45 Mistakes wrote: I actually don't mind too much. Everything else about this patch was fantastic. If prices go up a ton or something, it's not the end of the world imho.
I couldn't agree more. I think that the vast majority of people play D3 to kill stuff and get sweet loot, and this will never change. It seems like some people enjoy bashing on others no matter how they go about doing it, HC-SC-AH-RMAH-no AH at all.
The ones that really make me laugh are those who quit and feel the need to tell everyone about it. We know this isn't the first time that an exploit has hit the scene, but the sun keeps coming up, the game is getting better (imo), and people will keep playing. If you don't play that's cool too, but don't you have anything better to do?
The patch will sadly be remember for the fuck up and not the improvement to the game. I was in the middle of all this fiasco watching gems go from standard 11mil to 100mil in just a few hours after the patch was live. Blizzard said that they will remove ALL duped gold from the system and hand out bans fairly, but I'm not optimist about it.
well I dont think blizzard is ever gonna be able to actually remove all the duped gold with all those possible trades that probably took place, and since they refuse to rollback for some reason another solution would just basically print more money into the economy. Something like increase the gold drops by something like 10000x for everyone, (increase the AH cap/gold sinks accordingly of course) and just rollback people with 1 trillion+ gold. that way the economy would stabilize again pretty quickly to pretty much where it was before with a few more zeroes at the end of every transaction.
I have a friend who made ~2bill from this (relatively not that much)
he got an email saying the gold had been successfully rolled back, and that all his items were now all account-bound However, he muled his gold to a second account, and that gold hasn't been taken back
I don't know if people who kept the gold on their account actually had their gold taken away, but if you muled your money to somewhere, you prob still have it :O
On May 11 2013 11:31 JerKy wrote: I have a friend who made ~2bill from this (relatively not that much)
he got an email saying the gold had been successfully rolled back, and that all his items were now all account-bound However, he muled his gold to a second account, and that gold hasn't been taken back
I don't know if people who kept the gold on their account actually had their gold taken away, but if you muled your money to somewhere, you prob still have it :O
Or they're simply going through this layer by layer, and haven't gotten to the next level yet.
On May 11 2013 04:45 Mistakes wrote: I actually don't mind too much. Everything else about this patch was fantastic. If prices go up a ton or something, it's not the end of the world imho.
This isn't even close to the biggest game fiasco of all time, Eve Online has easily the top 10 locked.
This probably sits somewhere in the low 60's alongside that time in WoW where during an in-game funeral for someone who had actually died in real life a group of players came and killed everyone.
Great depression would be my guess, so Black Friday?
Btw, D2 had a bigger 'crash', where all accounts could be easily hacked, and they actually made selective rollbacks, where you had to sign up your account for it. That was right after the world's first level 100 char.
Specifically the Stock Market Crash which precipitated it (Known as Black Tuesday). Prices skyrocketed as the dollar's buying power plummeted. Prices on AH skyrocketed as money became worthless (easily obtained in great amounts quickly). It took a long time to recover then, and he compares that to the far reaching effects he expects to see now.
Great depression would be my guess, so Black Friday?
Black Friday is the day that has come to mean the day after thanksgiving when many companies that have been "in the red," i.e. operating at a loss all year, are now "in the black" from the increased shopping the day after thanksgiving. Thanksgiving on a Thursday, Black Friday follows.
Specifically the Stock Market Crash which precipitated it (Known as Black Tuesday). Prices skyrocketed as the dollar's buying power plummeted. Prices on AH skyrocketed as money became worthless (easily obtained in great amounts quickly). It took a long time to recover then, and he compares that to the far reaching effects he expects to see now.
Great depression would be my guess, so Black Friday?
Black Friday is the day that has come to mean the day after thanksgiving when many companies that have been "in the red," i.e. operating at a loss all year, are now "in the black" from the increased shopping the day after thanksgiving. Thanksgiving on a Thursday, Black Friday follows.
If a gold piece is as large as 1 euro cent, it would weigh ~5g, as gold is roughly double as dense as iron or copper, which is what those coins are made of.
Thus, if you own 1b gold pieces, that would weigh 50000000000g, or 5000 tons. This are ~250 m³ of gold, or a 5m*5m*10m brick made of pure gold.
I'm playing on EU but this patch has robbed me of any motivation to play. This just shows whats wrong with D3. Its a fucking economy-simulation and no game!
On May 11 2013 11:31 JerKy wrote: I have a friend who made ~2bill from this (relatively not that much)
he got an email saying the gold had been successfully rolled back, and that all his items were now all account-bound However, he muled his gold to a second account, and that gold hasn't been taken back
I don't know if people who kept the gold on their account actually had their gold taken away, but if you muled your money to somewhere, you prob still have it :O
The Diablo III license associated with this email address was recently locked to allow us to investigate potential in-game economy abuse. After thorough review, we determined that this license was involved with the abuse in question. However, as a show of good faith, we will unlock this account and allow this license to continue to accessDiablo III.
In order to address the abuse, we have performed a rollback for the license, and all items are now account-bound and cannot be traded. For more information on Diablo III rollbacks, see the Account Rollback section of our support article: https://battle.net/support/article/5400056.
Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment
And he says he's maintained the gold he muled off, and knows others who've also kept their gold :O
Checking the AH last night... I don't know what to do. Gold is so worthless now and everything costs 2b
On May 11 2013 11:31 JerKy wrote: I have a friend who made ~2bill from this (relatively not that much)
he got an email saying the gold had been successfully rolled back, and that all his items were now all account-bound However, he muled his gold to a second account, and that gold hasn't been taken back
I don't know if people who kept the gold on their account actually had their gold taken away, but if you muled your money to somewhere, you prob still have it :O
The Diablo III license associated with this email address was recently locked to allow us to investigate potential in-game economy abuse. After thorough review, we determined that this license was involved with the abuse in question. However, as a show of good faith, we will unlock this account and allow this license to continue to accessDiablo III.
In order to address the abuse, we have performed a rollback for the license, and all items are now account-bound and cannot be traded. For more information on Diablo III rollbacks, see the Account Rollback section of our support article: https://battle.net/support/article/5400056.
Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment
And he says he's maintained the gold he muled off, and knows others who've also kept their gold :O
Checking the AH last night... I don't know what to do. Gold is so worthless now and everything costs 2b
Everything is expensive right now because people don't know what to price their items as there was no references when the AH reopened. Just wait a few days and prices will be back to normal. AKA people are panicking atm about what their items are worth.
If a gold piece is as large as 1 euro cent, it would weigh ~5g, as gold is roughly double as dense as iron or copper, which is what those coins are made of.
Thus, if you own 1b gold pieces, that would weigh 50000000000g, or 5000 tons. This are ~250 m³ of gold, or a 5m*5m*10m brick made of pure gold.
This made me smile.
Following up, 1 ounce of pure gold is worth ~$1600 USD. (I didn't go look it up, but last I heard it was somewhere around that.)
5000 tons of gold = ~1.763b ounces of gold. Which would have a value of a bit over $2.8 trillion USD.
If a gold piece is as large as 1 euro cent, it would weigh ~5g, as gold is roughly double as dense as iron or copper, which is what those coins are made of.
Thus, if you own 1b gold pieces, that would weigh 50000000000g, or 5000 tons. This are ~250 m³ of gold, or a 5m*5m*10m brick made of pure gold.
This made me smile.
Following up, 1 ounce of pure gold is worth ~$1600 USD. (I didn't go look it up, but last I heard it was somewhere around that.)
5000 tons of gold = ~1.763b ounces of gold. Which would have a value of a bit over $2.8 trillion USD.
I doubt the gold coins are "pure" gold, probably an alloy. Pure gold is malleable which wouldn't really work for coins
If a gold piece is as large as 1 euro cent, it would weigh ~5g, as gold is roughly double as dense as iron or copper, which is what those coins are made of.
Thus, if you own 1b gold pieces, that would weigh 50000000000g, or 5000 tons. This are ~250 m³ of gold, or a 5m*5m*10m brick made of pure gold.
This made me smile.
Following up, 1 ounce of pure gold is worth ~$1600 USD. (I didn't go look it up, but last I heard it was somewhere around that.)
5000 tons of gold = ~1.763b ounces of gold. Which would have a value of a bit over $2.8 trillion USD.
I doubt the gold coins are "pure" gold, probably an alloy. Pure gold is malleable which wouldn't really work for coins
Further to this, €0.01 coins are made of steel with a copper plating, otherwise the metal in the coin would be worth more than its face value.
Yes. I read that stuff on wikipedia too. However, Iron has density of ~8g/cm³, copper ~9 g/cm³. Afaik steel is basically iron with a bit of shit in it. Within the accuracy of my calculation that stuff is basically all the same. Gold is at 19 g/cm³. Since i have no idea how large an actual gold coin would be, i just did a rough estimate. Which also means that my result is not really exact. Especially considering that i just randomly pulled the smallest coin i have lying around and decided that a Diablo gold coin would be that large.
For example, looking up a random gold coin on Wikipedia, we get something like this:
Which has 22 karat gold in it, meaning about 91.7%. It is also 6 times as a large as the one i randomly decided on.
I am in no way knowledgeable of gold coins or anything, but that 22 Karat number seems to be used on other coins i found roughly searching on wikipedia, too. There are probably a lot of other numbers, but i'd say this is as good as any as an estimate.
So basically, if your assumptions are so rough there is really no reason to go into the finer details, the whole idea was to come up with a very rough idea of how much 1 billion gold coins would actually be.
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
^ this may or may not have been me
And.. this story has a happy ending. The roughly 9b I made was sold for ~$1600 USD :-D I was online the moment the AH went back up and was able to post it all for $0.25/m, and it sold pretty fast. I was worried the stories of folks banned for flipping gems would delay the sales, but nope. 9x + Show Spoiler +
= win. Probably the last time I will ever sell gold too!
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
^ this may or may not have been me
And.. this story has a happy ending. The roughly 9b I made was sold for ~$1600 USD :-D I was online the moment the AH went back up and was able to post it all for $0.25/m, and it sold pretty fast. I was worried the stories of folks banned for flipping gems would delay the sales, but nope. 9x + Show Spoiler +
= win. Probably the last time I will ever sell gold too!
1929, this event was not! :-D
You profited, but 9 people got raped buying $1b for $250 when in reality 1b is worth like 1/10 of that.
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
^ this may or may not have been me
And.. this story has a happy ending. The roughly 9b I made was sold for ~$1600 USD :-D I was online the moment the AH went back up and was able to post it all for $0.25/m, and it sold pretty fast. I was worried the stories of folks banned for flipping gems would delay the sales, but nope. 9x + Show Spoiler +
= win. Probably the last time I will ever sell gold too!
1929, this event was not! :-D
You profited, but 9 people got raped buying $1b for $250 when in reality 1b is worth like 1/10 of that.
yes, we should feel bad/sad for the people who can afford to spend 250 dollars on virtual goods in a game...
If a gold piece is as large as 1 euro cent, it would weigh ~5g, as gold is roughly double as dense as iron or copper, which is what those coins are made of.
Thus, if you own 1b gold pieces, that would weigh 50000000000g, or 5000 tons. This are ~250 m³ of gold, or a 5m*5m*10m brick made of pure gold.
This made me smile.
Following up, 1 ounce of pure gold is worth ~$1600 USD. (I didn't go look it up, but last I heard it was somewhere around that.)
5000 tons of gold = ~1.763b ounces of gold. Which would have a value of a bit over $2.8 trillion USD.
I doubt the gold coins are "pure" gold, probably an alloy. Pure gold is malleable which wouldn't really work for coins
Further to this, €0.01 coins are made of steel with a copper plating, otherwise the metal in the coin would be worth more than its face value.
The process to create them + materials costs mor than it's face value, lots of money has been burn to create those coins, thats why they want to remove 0,01 and 0,02 coins now
On May 08 2013 21:19 Burrfoot wrote: Is not so much that the market was ruined, its that so much gold was created and transferred to non-duper that played the market when the item AND gem market went crazy. Folks could sell any half decent item worth 100m last week for 2b yesterday.
For example Legit player with 50m gold sees gem prices skyrocket to 150m He sells the few radiants he has and buys 50m of flawless gems to make 3 radiants (takes a few minutes to automake) They instantly sell for 150m/ea He goes wow! And repeats until AH goes down and he has billions. Logs on today with no ban
^ this may or may not have been me
And.. this story has a happy ending. The roughly 9b I made was sold for ~$1600 USD :-D I was online the moment the AH went back up and was able to post it all for $0.25/m, and it sold pretty fast. I was worried the stories of folks banned for flipping gems would delay the sales, but nope. 9x + Show Spoiler +
= win. Probably the last time I will ever sell gold too!
1929, this event was not! :-D
Good job burr, glad this game finally paid itself off for you. What country are you from?
On May 19 2013 12:38 emythrel wrote: that bbc link is about WoW... not D3
Diab-woe
Activision Blizzard has also hit money worries of a different kind this week.
An update to Diablo III on Monday contained several key updates - but one embarrassing bug.
Gamers quickly discovered that by cancelling "gold" auctions in the game, they could freely duplicate the in-game currency - with one user building up a reported 371 trillion gold using this method.
Developer Blizzard has closed the auction service on the game while it investigates.
The company said: "Our team is working hard to fix any outstanding issues and take appropriate actions with the accounts involved."
On May 19 2013 08:45 Domus wrote: yes, we should feel bad/sad for the people who can afford to spend 250 dollars on virtual goods in a game...
Pretty much this. I always knew people would be willing to buy gold at way above the 'market value', the problem was being the first to post the gold for sale which I was lucky enough to have sat online for Friday night. Now I'm back to selling crappy patterns for $0.85 :-D Peanuts ftw.
a rollback would only have removed a few hours of playtime from people. Now with trillions of gold flowing around, a lot of people have basically lost their "D3 savings" to inflation.
blizz should just get over themselves and introduce a ladder to D3.
A few trillion is a drop in the bucket in D3 economy terms. The reason that items are expensive is that the AH was reset and it's going to take a long while before undercutters can bring the economy back to where it was before the AH reset.
I do however think that D3 needs stronger gold sinks though if this game is going to last.
in diablo 2 CLASSIC gold is used, to purchase commodities, like perfect skulls. Gold can be used for gambling, and skulls can be used to re-roll rares.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IWkCLU2.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/eoVADyW.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/6tFLnJv.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/SsI1luk.png)
![[image loading]](http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg198/scaled.php?server=198&filename=weaponp.png&res=landing)
