When Blizzard announced that Diablo 3 would feature an auction house where items could legally be bought and sold using real money, there were equal parts skepticism and excitement.
Finally, casual players could purchase gold or shiny new items to give themselves a boost without having to go through shady black market merchants and deal with the risk of having their account banned if it was ever found out.
And for those merchants, they could likewise step from the shadowy corners of their illicit websites and become a legal purveyor of quality gold and virtual merchandise, feeling, for the first time perhaps, that their game playing prowess was finally being recognized and appreciated; that they had found their place in the world, both the virtual one they were currently residing in, and the real one.
The reality of how things would shake down should probably should have been obvious from the start however; while Diablo 3's RMAH has certainly provided benefit to players casual and hardcore, it's also been fraught with issues from the start.
Just one of those issues is hex exploits, which have allowed players to unfairly win auctions they otherwise should not have been able to by manipulating items up for auction through a hex editor, allowing them to buyout items for the bid price, even when the item had no buyout option. Complaints of this occurring to multiple players, and even how it was accomplished, can be found in this thread at Blizzhackers.cc.
It's not just hex exploits that are threatening to undermine the entire system though; in fact Blizzard has managed to shore up many of those loopholes with hotfixes shortly after uncovering them. Of greater concern are the gold farmers who are quickly drowning the economy with piles and piles of their ill-gotten gains, using whatever tricks they can to auto-accumulate vast sums of gold.
Check out this interview by games consultant Markus Eikenberry with a Diablo 3 gold farmer who simultaneously runs 100 Diablo 3 accounts and amasses 60 million gold an hour between them. What's most telling is that the gold farmer actually contacted Mr. Eikenberry to do the interview, hoping to shed light on the issue of game exploits so that Blizzard would hopefully fix them and slow the rate of gold flooding the market. You know there's a problem when even the farmers are concerned that it's just a little too easy to farm.
Of course, anyone familiar with online games knows that gold farmers, hackers, cheaters, etc. are prolific. If there's money to be made, an advantage to be gained, or simply a feeling of superiority to be achieved, people will do whatever they can to make that happen.
The fact that Diablo 3 contains a Real Money Auction House can hardly be blamed for the state of the game's economy, or the fact that holes are being exploited; real money or not, those things were likely bound to occur in a game of this magnitude anyway.
The real question though is what responsibility, if any, must Blizzard now accept when things like this take place, considering they're pocketing real money of their own on every transaction. Unlike companies which don't allow the trading of their intellectual property and can therefore distance themselves from any such occurrences, Blizzard no longer has that out. They've opened up a can of worms they perhaps wish they never had.
