Yesterday's release of the 1.0.8 patch for Diablo III fixed many known bugs, but it also added an exploit that let savvy users create in-game gold out of thin air, wreaking havoc on the in-game economy and real-money auction house.

By cancelling a transaction while it was still being processed, players on the 1.0.8 patch would get twice as much gold returned to them, creating an easy source of infinite in-game currency. Blizzard made players aware of the duplication bug last night and shut down the auction houses to limit the damage. A fix was pushed live to servers at 10:40pm PDT, according to an update to the official forum post addressing the issue.

Duplication bugs are nothing new in the Diablo series, of course. Still, duplication issues are potentially more serious in Diablo III, since the in-game auction houses let duplicated gold be traded for other players' items or even real money. Diablo III's persistent server connection was supposed to prevent issues like this through centralized control of players' item lists, but yesterday's bug proves it's not totally foolproof.

Rather than rolling back the servers by a day to erase any sign of the duplicated gold, Blizzard has decided to instead punish the "relatively few players" it says made use of the bug with "fairly limited" effect in the wider game. "We feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

That decision has created a great deal of controversy among some players who say Blizzard's actions will do nothing to fix the flood of duplicated gold that caused the value of legitimate gold to plummet in a very short time yesterday. "People with the infinite source of gold today purchased items non-stop for hours," forum poster Chillaxin noted in a popular thread of the D3 forums. "Quadrillions of gold flooded into the economy and was divided among the entire player-base to anyone selling items. You may have stopped the dupers but there is severe permanent damage if you don't rollback everything."

"The economy that existed was at best 'okay.' Now it is dreadful," forum user Buriz added. "I myself have no more use for my gold. The [auction house] died today when the rollback didn't happen."

This is just another example in a long line of reasons why we're moving our savings out of Diablo III gold and into precious beryllium.