May 21 Views (835) Neverwinter

Severs of Neverwinter rolled back seven hours after ingame currency exploit

Not a latest news though, but as you know Severs for Cryptic's MMO Neverwinter were rolled back seven hours over the weekend following an exploit that allowed players to amass billions in in-game currency, according to posts on the forums of publisher Perfect World Entertainment.
So for those of you that were hoping to get in some time with Neverwinter on a lazy Sunday, you probably noticed that all is not well in the D&D inspired Cryptic Studios MMORPG. Following the game’s social media outlets probably gave you a basic idea of exactly what was going on.
Without explaining the exploit in step by step detail, an exploit focused around being able to enter values in the auction house that really shouldn’t have been allowed was abused and thus astral diamonds were being duplicated. This quickly led to items being posted for absurd values so duplication could be completed on larger scales. Since Astral Diamonds can be exchanged for Zen (Perfect World’s Cash currency) in Neverwinter, this duplication had real life money implications in multiple ways.
In response to the exploit, Neverwinter disabled the in game auction house at around 11 A.M. PDT while the team at Cryptic starting investigating the reports. One hour later, Neverwinter stated on their Twitter account that the servers would be taken down totally so investigations could continue. The estimated down time was 1 hour.
Fast forward 12 hours later and the servers were still down.

At 11:13 PM Pacific Time, the Neverwinter team posted that they will in fact be performing a server rollback of 7 hours. All progress made between 5:20 AM Pacific Time and the time the servers were taken down would be reverted. Players are assured that all Zen purchases would remain in tact. Whenever the servers are actually brought back up, the Neverwinter Astral Diamonds exchange and the Auction house will be unavailable for an unknown time period.


Cryptic has stated that they have isolated the accounts involved in the exploit and is planning on taking actions up to and including the banning of accounts but, as is usually the case with these sorts of things, innocent players may find themselves banned from the game erroneously. If this happens to you, Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) has advised you to file a support ticket.
There are a number of concerns that this brings up for the fledgling free to play title though. Numerous exploits have already been reported (such as Foundry and Boss Fight exploits) and the fixes for many have been slow in coming. Closed beta players are also chiming in on the twitter discussion and the forums to advise that this exact auction house bug, and many others, were reported in closed beta yet still made it to an open beta that PWE is making money on.
What impact this whole situation has on Neverwinter‘s ultimate success still has yet to be seen, but having your Cat market bubble burst like the housing bubble can’t be good in the long run.
Since this has happened, so I want to know will you still buy astral diamonds through the auction house in the future?