Diablo 3 has made lots of news since its release, and the vast majority of that news has been bad. Now Blizzard is updating one of their fraud-protection services to prevent its misuse and abuse by unscrupulous players.
Specifically they are adding an effect to the process of retrieving a character’s data to restore previous items and stats. The practice is in place at all to protect players who have their accounts compromised, allowing Blizzard to return their items to their previous pre-stolen state. The practice already had to be revised to prevent Hardcore characters from submitting account hack reports to get hardcore characters brought back to life.
The item duplication sees a character hand off their items to a friend and then request an account rollback. Now this person has two copies of their items, one in their possession and one in their friend’s. Repeat as desired. This was being used to both spread good items among friends and to deluge the auction house with expensive items.
The fix? A Diablo 3 character’s items will be permanently locked to that character on rollback. Such items cannot be sold on the auction house and cannot be traded to another player. Hopefully this fix can help keep Diablo 3 out of the news for a while.
