Heard it Through the Grapevine
I first heard about all of this from this thread on The Consortium. Many members were having massive amounts of TCG items bought up all at once, and were posting about it on this thread. Unfortunately my own TCG mounts I bought to flip months ago are still rotting away on the Auction House, guess they didn't like small servers. After reading UtesDad's comment on that thread I was curious about the actual method, and headed over to Ownedcore to see what I could learn.
Unlimited Moneys!
From what I can tell there are possibly 2 dupes, although the info on this first one is less documented than the later one I'll cover. From what they're saying with this one you were able to log in to the game and Remote AH at the same time (you previously couldn't so I'm not sure how they got around it), and if you purchased an item from the AH, it wouldn't subtract from your gold total, but you'd get the item, basically generating unlimited gold. This would of course explain the Remote Auction House being down, but I can't verify this one. If it's true, the implications are going to be interesting. Here is the thread from Ownedcore with more details (slightly NSFW).
Bags of Money
The second one is a little different. If you've opened a http://www.wowhead.com/item=89125/sack-of-pet-supplies, http://www.wowhead.com/item=94207, http://www.wowhead.com/item=98546, or any similar bag since 5.3 dropped, you'd notice that there's a new looting mechanism for these bags, where using the bags doesn't have a normal loot interface, but pops up as if you won something in raid finder. Blizzard changed the mechanisms for these bags in 5.3, apparently because they now include protection for bad luck streaks in their algorithms (from patch notes):
"Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to Battle-Stones from pet supplies bags and wild battles. Each bag or battle that does not provide a stone has a progressively better chance to award a stone to the player."
So apparently Blizzard didn't have the foresight to put a cooldown on these bags, and if you macroed it to your scroll wheel you could trick WoW into thinking you opened 30-50 bags, or more. Since these bags all contain gold, it basically gave you a license to print money. If you want to read some more about logistics, here's the thread from Ownedcore. A very interesting set of exploits, check out the threads to learn more, it will be very interesting to see how Blizzard deals with this in the days to come.
Cheers,
Phat Lewts
If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!
Now if there was only some way someone could figure out how to dupe Giant Dinosaur Bones lol
ReplyDeleteI definitely managed to connect to the RAH and be online at the same time, immediately after the patch (first day or two). I didn't know of any exploit, though, and don't think I benefited.
ReplyDeleteProtection for bad luck streaks have been added to Battle-Stones from pet supplies bags
ReplyDeletethats a lie. after 5.3 i got less and less stone... im fucking tired with blizzard lies.
Why would you provide direct links to how the dupe process is being done? T_T
ReplyDeleteboth methods were already fixed at the time of the post, educational only.
DeleteHmm, I had 2 TCG mounts bought 2 nights ago. I just figured I got lucky. I usually don't mess with that market and only bought them because they were rather cheap and I figured if they didn't sell in 2 weeks I would just learn them.
ReplyDeleteI should have mentioned that they sold that night for a total profit of about 150k.
DeleteDon't forget about all the pet collectors that legitimately saved up many bags (I saved over 100) because of the bad luck streak protection they added. I opened all my bags on patch day and am currently under a 72 hour ban because of it. At least I assume that's the reason. They don't really tell you specifically why they suspend you.
ReplyDeleteOh joy, the causes of inflation. Although, I'd probably get a kick out stumbling over a trick like that lol :)
ReplyDeletein case anyone has been keeping up with the thread on the pet battles forum post, people who did the macro loophole are getting banned left and right.
ReplyDeletebe happy with yourself if you don't try to use exploits like this and lose your account. if you were all to instantly get 999,999,999 gold, how long would you even play the game before you got bored. the challenge is what makes it fun.
Waiting on their announcement of how they're going to deal with it... been over a week now?
ReplyDelete