Diablo 3 gold-multiplying bug profits will be donated to charity

All profits made by Diablo 3 players who exploited the gold-multiplying bug will be donated to charity, production director John Hight announced via Battle.net.

Hight addressed the recent bug, unleashed after the game's 1.0.8 patch went live, that allowed players to duplicate gold from stacks of 1 million to 10 million through the real-money Auction House. Hight wrote that the team will ensure that all "legitimate transactions" will proceed as usual, and that players who did not take advantage of the bug will be allowed to keep their items, gold and money from sales.

"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," Hight wrote.

According to Hight, only a small number of players had the funds to take advantage of the bug, and "only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain." Anyone found exploiting the bug has been banned or had their account rolled back, effectively deleting their progress since the 1.0.8 update.

Diablo 3's Auction Houses were brought back online late Friday night. The team will continue to remove duplicated gold from the game's economy rather than doing a complete rollback, which would bring the servers down and delete all player progress. According to Hight, more than 85 percent of the duplicate gold has already been removed.

Thanks for the tip, John.