Now before we begin on this news bit, we understand that the exploit has been around for more than a day. With an unscheduled maintenance already taken place over the last few hours and with many facing horrible lag to the server at this moment, the reason for all this is due to Blizzard trying to fix a seemingly simple exploit that allows hackers to buy items on the Auction House for almost next to nothing.
The concept to the exploit is quite simply grandma-nodding-simple; buying an item at its bidding price instead of the buyout price.
Say for example I’m going to sell a Prestige Slayer Rare Amulet on the auction house. I set the initial starting bid at 1 million gold simply because I’m feeling ignorantly generous, but being the hopeful douche that I am, I set the buyout price at 10 million gold. The hacker sees my amulet and decides to use the exploit. After a few shadowy tinkering behind his monitor and nasty keyboard, he buys my amulet for a mind numbingly — 1 million gold. I start slamming anything I see because I know the amulet is obviously worth more than a million peanuts.
All the hacker needs to do now is rinse and repeat, then laugh his/her way off on the Real Money Auction House earning the green bucks.
While Blizzard has already ran an unscheduled maintenance, people are still reporting on the official Diablo 3 forums (though they are being taken down rapidly) that the exploit still works. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any official statement as of yet from Blizzard themselves.
We’ll report back as soon as we hear anything.
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What exactly is the hack/exploit here? A program that scans for low bid auctions? It doesn’t really say so all I can conclude here is that these “hackers” make use of people’s ignorance, setting the bid price too low. That’s just their fault really.
You obviously can’t read. They pick an item with no buy-out and a low starting bid, and no matter how long the bidding should be going for they buy that item for cheap right away.
@g0d: It seems you can not read as well. “I set the initial starting bid at 1 million gold simply because I’m feeling ignorantly generous, but being the hopeful douche that I am, I set the buyout price at 10 million gold.” Lets read this together shall we! I SET THE BUYOUT PRICE AT 10 MILLION GOLD. Lets take a look at what you said: “They pick an item with no buy-out and a low starting bid” WITH NO BUYOUT. Stupid is as stupid does i guess. I am not looking for an explanation of HOW to exploit works, but simply pointing out what the Author has written.
@Dur Just because this website got it wrong doesn’t mean @g0d is wrong. The exploit was explained better in another news website that likes to slate diablo 3: It was something along the lines of changing the code of the buyot button with the bid button on your system but it only works on items that have NO BUYOUT set.