The Diablo 3 auction house will be offline for at least one more day, meaning late Friday afternoon, according to an announcement from Blizzard on Thursday May 9.
The recent 10.8 patch for Diablo 3 initiated the downtime. The patch allowed for an exploit whereby players could generate trillions worth of gold. Although the bug has been fixed, the gold and real-money auction houses will stay offline for an indefinite length of time in the Americas. Since Blizzard is auditing those who exploited the bug, a rollback has not been considered necessary.
"This audit is a time-intensive process, and to make sure that we can do a thorough job, we're going to keep the Auction Houses in maintenance until that work is complete," Community Manager Lylirra said in a forum post announcing the initiative.
According to Lylirra, an audit focused on the "few players that exploited this bug" would be less disruptive than "taking everyone offline for a day (or more)-losing all the progress they made."
Many are upset with the decision, however, and have made their voices known in the Diablo 3 forums, calling for a rollback instead of audits. Others, meanwhile, are attempting an investigation of the coding error that initially caused the problem.
Blizzard hasn't stated when the service will be restored, but updates should be posted on the announcement thread on Blizzard's forums.
While over a million unique users log in to Diablo 3 each day, the incorporation of an auction house has remained a controversial move.
