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    Kinda like this...

    Kinda like this…

    Thursday evening an exploit went public that allowed players to spawn almost infinite amounts of blood shards from Blood Thief goblins. The trick was to find a Blood Thief, and while one player stayed near him, the others in the game went into a Greater Rift, before the first player killed the Goblin. In some way this caused the Goblins to drop thousands of shards for each person in the Grift, and the normal amount for the one who did the killing.

    The trick could be repeated every time a Blood Thief was located, word spread quickly, streamers were demonstrating it live, and things rapidly got out of hand with players gambling through tens or even hundreds of thousands of Blood Shards. Blizzard hotfix disabled the exploit by requiring everyone in the game to be within proximity of the goblin in order for Shards to drop, and now that the bug is fixed, outraged fans are demanding that heads roll, and Blizzard seems to agree.

    We’re currently working on a hotfix to address an exploit that allows players to gain a significantly larger number of Blood Shards from Blood Thief goblins than intended. While we don’t have an ETA to share at this time, we’re looking to implement the hotfix (which will also address the underlying bug) as soon as possible in all gameplay regions and will be sure to update this thread once it’s live.

    With this, we’re also in the process of actioning accounts which have been found to be actively using this exploit to gain an unfair advantage. This behavior not only undermines the spirit play, but directly violates our in-game policies for Diablo III. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and enjoyable online environment for legitimate players is very important to us, and we’ll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take additional action as needed.

    In the meantime, we encourage everyone to please game responsibly. Not only can using exploits lead to account penalties, but it can also negatively impact the enjoyment of your fellow players. This is why we’re working as quickly as we can to fix the underlying issue, and why we’d appreciate your help in keeping the effects of the exploit as minimal as possible until it’s removed from the game.

    For more information on how to report exploitative behavior, click here. For questions regarding account actions, please refer to Account Administration.

    There are numerous claims that various streamers were banned for exploiting this, but there’s a lot of trolling going on with people claiming to be banned to get attention, or accusing others of using the exploit. How many people were actually doing it and how much (if at all) this will impact the Leaderboards (chars from banned accounts vanish from the Rankings) remains to be seen. Blood Thief Exploit Hotfixed, Bans Coming.

    Also note that the hotfix tonight didn’t properly fix non-splitting Gelatinous Sires, and they will now rarely do some mega-splitting, resulting in dozens of Gelatinous Spawn, rather than just the half dozen or so intended. Hopefully Blizzard won’t deem their execution another exploit, and likely we’ll see another hotfix soon to fix that issue as well.

    John Yang tweeted this slightly-cryptic comment on the exploit late last night:

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