Diablo III gold-multiplying bug profits to go to charity

Diablo III production director John Hight announced on the Battle.net forums that all profits made by Diablo III players who exploited last week's gold-multiplying bug will be donated to charity.

The proceeds made through the game's real money auction house by the suspended or banned players will be given to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. This includes the player's sale proceeds and Blizzard's transaction fees.

As reported previously, the bug allowed players to duplicate gold from stacks of a million to 10 million via the game's real money auction house. This in turn made Blizzard shut down the auction house temporarily from May 7 until late last Friday on May 10. According to the forum post, only a few players had the funds to take advantage of the bug, with 415 of those players using the bug for personal gain. Players who were caught exploiting the bug were either been banned or had their account rolled back.

About 85 percent of the duplicate gold had been removed, according to Hight. Efforts to remove more duplicate gold from the economy are currently underway, as doing a complete rollback will bring the game's servers down and delete all player progress.