'Diablo 3' Auction Houses To Stay Offline For Another 24 Hours

A Blizzard community manager posted on the "Diablo 3" forums, indicating that the game’s Auction Houses will be kept offline for at least another day.

“We don’t have a new ETA, but we anticipate that the service will be unavailable for at least another 24 hours. We’ll continue to provide updates in this thread regarding the status of our Auction House maintenance as they become available,” the community manager Lylirra said.

Blizzard took "Diablo 3"’s Auction Houses offline in response to an exploit that was discovered by players which allowed them to duplicate massive amounts of gold after the 1.0.8 patch was applied on Tuesday. Some players have called for the patch to be rolled back, but Blizzard has opted not to take this approach.

The Blizzard community manager briefly explained the company’s approach in the latest post.

“We decided to perform a complete audit and focus on the few players that exploited this bug rather than performing a full rollback and taking everyone offline for a day – losing all the progress they made,” Lylirra said.

Some "Diablo 3" players have stated that the game has been ruined, with some claiming that players are leaving en masse. One forum poster said, “Mass exodus from "Diablo 3." It'll be interesting to see whether the game's player numbers will return to pre-gold dupe levels once the Auction Houses are brought back online.

How do you feel about this latest issue? Do you think that this is yet another piece of evidence in the case against “always-on” gaming? Do you think Blizzard should have approached this problem differently? What should they do in the future if and when problems like this arise again, especially in "Diablo 3"? Sound off in the comments below.