With the news that they won't be doing a rollback - a decision I feel the vast majority of players would've grudgingly accepted - I'm left wondering why this took so long in the first place. My best guess is that everyone got to go home for a well-deserved rest after the overnight patching process. I know that after a 12-16 hour shift, I wouldn't want to stick around any longer than necessary to check that the patch was stable. The dupe only really kicked into high gear about 2-3 hours after the patch went live which was certainly enough time for some critical staff to be asleep at home.

That said, they must have had someone on staff that could've shut down the servers or AHs as soon as the news started flowing in. The fact that it took multiple hours to make the decision to even shut down the AHs means they have an enormous leadership problem. I can understand it's a huge decision, because every minute the RMAH is in operation, is a minute Blizzard is earning revenue. Pulling it down for even an hour during a high traffic time could cost Blizzard thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know if I'd want to cost my company $10k on a hoax.

That said, it's a damning condemnation of how Blizzard has set up their corporation. The environment there is clearly one where employees in critical positions don't feel empowered to make tough decisions without serious adverse repercussions. A corporation with empowered employees would've had the servers down within an hour of there clearly being a problem with the markets.

We had an entire thread devoted to what mat prices would do with historical data on the previous patch release on what to expect regarding what 'normal' behavior is. A 300% return is about the best we've seen so when Emerald prices went over 9,000 there should've been alarm bells. When they hit 15,000, everything should have been suspended.

I think the Diablo 3 team is either still in denial that the AH is now an integrated part of the game or that they're simply woefully unprepared to deal with a game that has unexpectedly developed a market economy component to it (due to their predecessors being short-sighted, to put it nicely). Of course, even if the RMAH is in shambles after this and they lose $100,000 in long-term revenue, that still probably doesn't cover the salary of someone that could effectively manage a game with an integrated market economy. EVE Online is pretty much the only game that has ever done this and they still get caught with their pants down every so often.

Still, I think Blizzard needs to be raked over the coals for their disaster response and more specifically, their lack thereof.

Agreed, Blizz also indirectly made quite a nice cut from dupers selling gems on RMAH, so i guess there is some incentive for them to linger...

Eh, I prefer the explanation of incompetence vs. conspiracy here.

Is there a case for fraud claims here from people cashing out items bought with duped gold to PayPal? it seems like there should be but who "lost" from this?

Edit: To make sure im on topic, Blizz failed with such a slow decision. AH should have been suspended instantly the dupe was confirmed, or at worst the servers taken offline in preperation for a rollback. Instead it took 2-3 hours and a lot of people indirectly became billionaires.

Posted by ecocd at 05/08/2013 06:09 AM

We had an entire thread devoted to what mat prices would do with historical data on the previous patch release on what to expect regarding what 'normal' behavior is. A 300% return is about the best we've seen so when Emerald prices went over 9,000 there should've been alarm bells. When they hit 15,000, everything should have been suspended.

I don't agree with this. Things will go crazy every once and awhile and having a set amount of gold an item can get to because the servers get shut down essentially doesn't sound like a good idea. I do agree that they should have brought the servers down a lot sooner, but for the first hour or two most people didn't know about the duping method and for all everyone knew things were just going insane. In fact a lot of people were saying they thought the gem prices were rising like crazy because the gold floor was lowered so they were making up for that.

When people notified them about the dupe method and Blizzard was able to confirm that it did work they should have taken the game down for emergency maintenance.

Posted by ecocd at 05/08/2013 08:06 AM

Eh, I prefer the explanation of incompetence vs. conspiracy here.

I agree with this.

Posted by ecocd at 05/08/2013 06:09 AM

We had an entire thread devoted to what mat prices would do with historical data on the previous patch release on what to expect regarding what 'normal' behavior is. A 300% return is about the best we've seen so when Emerald prices went over 9,000 there should've been alarm bells. When they hit 15,000, everything should have been suspended.

Not this.

What a cluster, but I like free market. Makes selling much more enjoyable. Just take the gold changes they have made. What if gold was still priced in the AH at .25 per 100k? Why even sell gold anymore at those prices? I'd like to see gold completely floorless, so that the true price would be reflected and we wouldn't have to calculate returns on gems and spot check prices. One simple conversion at prices people are willing to liquidate at.

Then if I want to sell my gold at the current price, I can sell it all at once, and won't be competing with third party gold sellers (because you always are, indirectly).

I will say this though, I'm EXTREMELY excited to finally have a gold and item sink in Softcore, and sincerely hope that not only do people who abused it get banned, but I hope they got a metric TON of the best items available in the Auction House.

If so, self found will be much more rewarding. And in the meantime, there will be tons of price swings to play.

@nuhertz I hadn't meant that the AH should have shut down automatically, but by the time the prices hit 15,000 something was definitely off. When they hit 60,000 (I purchased at 60,000 per Flawless Square Emerald and still turned a 100+% profit when crafted), there shouldn't have been any question at all that something was seriously wrong and it was still hours after that until they shut down the auction house.

I hadn't thought at all about the item sink aspect. There couldn't have been a single good item left on the GAH by the time they shut it down. The question is whether they managed to sell them off on the RMAH or transfer them to other accounts in time to be protected from the account wipe. Every trifecta ring available was probably bought out as soon as it was put up almost regardless of the price.