Duping Hack destroys World of Warcraft Gold value
My home server has seen a sudden surge in Queen’s Garnet and Crimson Deathcharger items, allegedly due to duping hacks by clever, but malicious, profiteers. The Consortium forum at Stormspire also reported an increase in numbers of Queen’s Garnets How did this happen?
World of Warcraft is a complicated game, as UtesDad of US-Eitrigg says, and that’s why these small loopholes can be found. Blizzard will be working behind the scenes to hot-fix the problems, but in the meantime, gold gamers’ investments have dropped in value.
Worldwide Crimson Deathcharger prices
Data from The Undermine Journal shows that the number of Crimson Deathchargers available worldwide is 202. My server saw 9 out of those 202, which is a considerable percentage.
Notice also how the standard deviation spread is almost as much as the actual market price. That’s a wide spread of prices, between the hopeful sellers (high price) and the quick turnaround day traders (low price).
NEW: WoW Gold Dupe (February 17, 2012)
We have recently discovered a working gold dupe exploit which has recently become possible because of a flaw in Cataclysm’s code! Make sure you check this out and make good use of it, as it will likely be patched soon!
Quote from “World of Warcraft Exploits Website” (URL withheld)
Duping exploits and hacks are against all Blizzard terms, and accounts involved with duping will be facing the ban hammer. But, Blizzard, banning players for innocently buying these cheap items, thinking they have a great deal, is a complete FAIL by your customer services. Those players were victims of your ineptitude. Please sort this out asap!
How much have my investments fallen?
Invested: 60,000 in queen’s garnet, now worth only 40,000g. One Death Charger, bought for 120k
Potential Loss 20k in queen’s garnet, 10-20k on mount. 40k is only two day’s work on WoW, but it’s still seriously annoying, 40,000g would buy me a lot of stuff! I don’t like taking any loss, ever. Don’t worry this is only a very small percentage of my investments, I’m still making a lot of gold with my other sales.
What I am worrying about is any players who have made a significant investment in these duped items in all innocence.
Are the Gold Sellers and Hackers becoming more clever?
Aside from these WoW dupe hacks, I’m also seeing a decrease in in numbers of herbs and ore available on the AH. Bots are being purged from the system. Â At the same time, I’m seeing players throwing hundreds of gems on to AH to form a wall. Do they really have 50g to spend on AH fees just for the thrill of blocking their competitors? Or are these clever farmers? Something to think about.
What to do about Warcraft Hacking Dupes
If you suspect a duped item, report it, don’t buy it. I suspected duping only after I’d innocently bought my investments. Use the ! HELP facility to contact a GM games master.
- Stop buying
- Stop selling in bulk. You will have a lot of competition and wear yourself out with frustration undercutting each other.
- Be patient. This too will pass. The dupes will sell, and you will have your opportunity to sell. Watch for the opportunity.
- Sell one at a time.
- Look for alternate markets. Gems flooded? Try engineering items, herbs, or transmogrification items.
- Don’t annoy your competitors, it doesn’t help anyone.
- Post a rant here and get rid of your frustration.
Have you seen Duping on your WoW server? Items falling in price, and abnormally high supply?
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.
UPDATE: As this article goes to press, I sold my Crimson Deathcharger at a 20k profit, but found a massive sudden influx of raw Queen’s Garnets on the WoW AH at low prices.
There’s a massive influx of Queen’s Garnets across multiple server. They are level 1 toons who don’t speak English and sell the Brilliant Queen’s Garnet by the stack in trade chat.
Some servers are reporting people selling these by the hundreds. They’ve also reported the sellers asking the buyers to wait a moment while they get more. Without going by a mailbox or a bank, the level 1 characters suddenly have more stacks a few minutes later.
There’s a dupe going on, all right.
Loads of spam on my server people selling Queens Garnet for 25K a stack (20). 2 sellers acusing eachother of goldselling, duping etc.. Price dropped fast in their tradewar, making my 30K investment completely useless in a matter of minutes. Damn annoying, since I was just at a point of my first 50K feeling more comfortable of doing bigger investments. Seems I made a mistake there, beeing a bit over confident there.
Seeing how I raid somewhat seriously I might count my loss and use the gems myself, and start from ‘scratch’ with the 20K I have left.
/sadface
Yours, and my, problem was that we can plan for what we know, and what we’ve seen, but simply don’t expect hacking or duping.
/sadface too
Blizzard will never punish a player for *buying duped goods, goods from a hacked account or anything like that. I used to refuse to buy such goods until I realized my worst competitor (who botted the AH 24/7) did it all the time.
Now my approach is to buy it because if I don’t my competition will, then immediately put in a ticket telling the GMs about my purchase and that I believe the items are duped or the account was hacked.
I have done this many, many times and never been banned for it. I have however be thanked for the report every single time (albeit , it’s the same canned response every time, it is still a thank you).
I understand that duping has become the new problem, however banning the “AH uneducated” is not the answer. I like many out there am an AH entrepreneur, and have taken advantage of an incorrectly priced item. For example towards the beginning of cataclysm I was able to purchase a [vial of sands] from the AH for 3475g and random change, obviously the seller left off the 0 and the price should have been 34750g. Now because of someones inexperience or not paying attention at the time of posting, should I be in trouble from Blizzard… No… Although I was in the right place at the right time and took advantage of someone’s misfortune I did nothing wrong… This is same for the person that hits the AH and see’s a value purchase opportunity and takes advantage of it… They did nothing wrong… I mean I will not approach the AH with any doubt, playing as long as I have been.. there are misfortune, and uneducated people out there at all times, and well sometimes mistakes happen, should you pay the price for someone being out of touch with the server economy?
Hey the method for duplicating these items has supposedly been fixed with the 4.3.2 patch. If people are still selling these items odds are they are the residuals from using this method.
Also something that’s interesting to note is that your server might not have actually seen 9 of these. It could be the same guy posting the same one multiple times. For example if I posted one at 999,999g99s99c, then cancelled it 3 hours later, TUJ will consider it to have been sold, which could also skew the standard deviation and price quite a bit for an item with such few sales
Hi, I hope you’re right and this duping has been ended now.
The one thing I disagree with here is that Blizzard is handling this poorly. If they give people a reason not to buy, then they kill any reason to sell, and if there’s no reason to sell, there’s no good reason to dupe.
For whatever reason, Blizzard seems to be having trouble getting a handle on these duping methods, so this seems like a pretty effective way of dealing with it. Not only that, but down the road WHEN new duping methods pop up, the novelty of “don’t buy duped items” prevails.
The only thing I might say is that perhaps it should be explicitly stated in the TOS, or msaybe ease up on the auto-bans and just destroy the inventory. But I don’t think that penalizing the buyers is necessarily a bad idea.
Kath, with respect, I could not disagree with you more. The idea that banning the ignorant buying something on the AH will ultimately provide a deterent to cheaters is absurd. We’re preaching to the choir in this venue… However, the vast, vast majority of WoW players do not know the markets they’re fumbling through… if a botter posts a thousand stacks of ore for half its market value, and an inexperienced player happens upon it and buys a chunk of it, how does punishing that player deter the botter? The botter will never know the buyer was banned, and they already have the gold. The player banned will immediately be replaced by another unknowing player who will walk right into the same trap. Banning the buyer has zero impact or deterent on the botter/cheater.
As far as i understand the way it’s working… the ban’s aren’t being applied directly to people who buy it off the AH… just like bans for snipping the neutral AH aren’t around… HOWEVER if you buy from someone in trade chat, or something along those lines and KNOW there is something going on… well then thats where the bans are coming from… with the AH blizzard has no way of proving someone did something intentionally (granted having 1000 queen’s garnet’s up might be a hint) they could have unknowingly left off a zero, or had their addon misconfigured (trust me it’s happened and i lost 10k), however putting a price in trade there is proof it’s intentional.
I play horde on Area 52, it’s one of the highest pop horde servers and I haven’t noticed any duped items yet. We do have a large number of crimson deathchargers on our ah, however it seems more likely with the population and nerfs to the shadowmourne quest chain that this are players that are simply farming them with their guilds.
It’s mid March now, and I’m seeing more Crimson Deathchargers. I’m also seeing relatively cheap tabards and other Shadowmourne questline items, so these do tie in together.
When you see a bazillion deathchargers and no tabards, don’t touch them with a bargepole 😀
Yesterday we had a lvl 1 selling 120 queen’s garnets. Can’t imagine that’s from more boss kills. And we have that horse on the AH, too. EU-Area52
I think with wow losing subscribers and now this it looks very bad.
How hard is it to be patched? I am really. How do they not track this?
its pretty obvious when a lvl 1 starts spamming trade with cheap Garnets in quantities of 40+ …as to the wall of gems in the AH…i have hundreds of every color by now, even infernos and i have thousands of stacks of elementium i don’t even have the time to prospect especially when i can can flip the ah so readily. My horde server is fine deflation-wise but the alliance side has gone on a selling spree i have no interest in curbing…how easily they forgot the end of wrath we should hit sub 100g infernos possibly much lower in a month at this rate
Lvl 1 spamming trade chat selling anything for less than its value means duping, hacking, or maybe a guild bank rip off. Avoid!
A level 85 selling 20 queen’s garnets at 75% value, with no other suspicious activities seen (yet) on the server. Would you bite? I did.
People might now the usual price of gems and not claim ignorance, but if a Deathcharger is sold for 100k, hardly anyone will know if that’s a normal price or not. I would buy it, I would think it’s fair, but apparently (judging from the graph above) that is extremely under-priced.
Grr Deathcharger now down to 50k I was so lucky I had the opportunity to sell it for a profit before the prices completely bombed!
Assuming malicious intentions and proving them are two different pairs of shoes.
If you ask me, the ‘surge’ in queen’s garnet is because of the nerf in DS resulting in more boss kills.
or at least im not seeing such huge surges on my server 🙂