Diablo 3 exploit proceeds to go to charity

Blizzard has identified 415 Diablo 3 players who took advantage of last week's gold multiplying exploit, and will be diverting their profits directly to a good cause.

Writing on the Battle.net forums, Diablo 3 production director John Hight said Blizzard considered a complete rollback in reponse to the exploit but decided against it so as not to punish all those players who didn't take advantage of the exploit.

Instead, those who did sieze the opportunity to make some illicit cash had their accounts locked while Blizzard decided whether to rollback or ban them on a case-by-case basis.

"We elected not to roll back the servers in The Americas and are instead working to remove duplicated gold from the economy through targeted audits and account actions without taking away progress that our players rightfully earned," he said.

"As of this this post, we have already recaptured more than 85% of the excess gold from the accounts involved, and over the days ahead we will continue to pore over our audit data to reclaim as much duplicate currency as possible"

Not only will the innocent not be punished, the efforts of the guilty will actually have a positive knock-on effect.

"Many people bought and sold items and gold on the Auction House on Tuesday. We're making sure that all legitimate transactions go through. This means that if your account was not involved in the exploit, you will get to keep your items and gold, as well as any money you received from sales on the real-money Auction House," Hight said.

"We'll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players - including all of their sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee - to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals."

Lovely.

Thanks, Polygon.