A Diablo 3 player has earned more than $10,000 through the real-money auction house in Blizzard Entertainment’s action role-playing game. The player, WishboneTheDog claims that he legitimately earned the cash through investing and trading in the item market and even has proof of his Paypal transactions to back up his claims.

“I have never botted, scammed, used any of the number of exploits, or cheated in any way whatsoever,” he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything post.  “Before this game, I never made any money off of what I did because it was against the rules. Investing and trading in the item markets is part of how I have my fun, it wouldn’t make sense for me to cheat. Anyone who played D2 with hacks knows what I mean.”

NEWS: Diablo 3 Has Sold More Than 10 Million Copies; WoW Subs Down To 9.1 Million

His Reddit AMA goes through his practices, how he started up, the state of the economy in Diablo 3, and more. If you’re interested in video game economies, I highly recommend checking it out . 

Diablo 3 Started Edition is now available for would-be heroes who aren’t sure if taking on hordes of evil is right for them. Sanctuary needs a few more good men and women, so if you’re up for the task, you can play for free  up to the Skeleton King boss at the end of Act 1. The level cap is 13.

REVIEW: Diablo 3 Video Review

To get access to Diablo 3 Started Edition try one of the ways listed below.

Log in to your existing Battle.net account at http://www.battle.net, and sign up for the Diablo III Starter Edition through the “Your Game Accounts” section.
Create a new Battle.net account here and the Diablo III Starter Edition license will be added to your account automatically.
Grab the Diablo III game disc from a friend, install the game, and then log in with your Battle.net account. The Diablo III Starter Edition will be added to your account automatically.

If you decide to give Diablo 3 Started Edition a whirl, and then decide to keep playing, your progress will carry over. 

Blizzard has taken the Diablo 3 gold and real-money Auction Houses offline after the game’s 1.0.8 patch, which went live earlier today, introduced a gold duping bug that led to players amassing up to trillions in gold, causing serious problems with the Diablo 3 economy.

Announced in April, the patch aimed to bolster Diablo 3’s cooperative multiplayer experience. It added multiplayer bonus changes, matchmaking tags and a long list of general fixes.

“After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we made the decision to take the gold and real-money Auction Houses offline to investigate a bug that certain players were exploiting to dupe gold,” a Blizzard spokesperson told Polygon. “Our team is working hard to fix any outstanding issues and take appropriate actions with the accounts involved.”

According to a Battle.net post, many players now have billions in gold and one player has amassed 371 trillion gold through the exploitation. A NeoGAF forum member wrote that when Blizzard dropped the gold floor from $0.25 a million to $0.25 cents per 10 million “players then bought gems for real money and converted them to gold,” and then the gold dupe was discovered with “some streamers duping TRILLIONS.”

Blizzard revealed on a Battle.net post at 10:15 p.m. PT, that it believes it has found a fix for the gold duping bug and will deploy it to all regions. Diablo 3 will be in maintenance for an hour as a result.

Diablo 3 players are petitioning Blizzard via multiple threads on Battle.net to roll back to the start of the patch; however, Blizzard stated in a post that it needs “to determine whether or not a rollback is appropriate.” 

The competition will be stiff. Activision is set to launch a third Skylanders title, Skylanders Swap Force, this fall into a market where Disney Interactive’s Disney Infinity — a similar family-friendly title with physical toys — has already been released. And while the next Call of Duty title, Call of Duty: Ghosts, will be released Nov. 5, Activision said earlier this year that it expects poorer sales performance from Ghosts than from Black Ops 2.

Activision reported “better-than-expected” financial results for the first quarter of 2013 today, but according to CEO Bobby Kotick, the company expects to encounter a more challenging back half of the year.

The publisher brought in net revenues of $1.32 billion during the quarter that ended March 31, a 13 percent improvement over the same period in 2012 and 14.1 percent ahead of the company’s projections. Activision also showed a marked year-over-year jump in net income from $384 million to $456 million, a 13.75 percent increase.

Activision’s earnings were buoyed by the impressive sales performance of StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, which was the top-selling Windows PC game in North America and Europe even though it launched with three weeks left in the quarter. In addition, Diablo 3, Skylanders Giants and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 all continued to sell well.

“While we have had a solid start to the year, we now believe that the risks and uncertainties in the back half of 2013 are more challenging than our earlier view, especially in the holiday quarter,” said Kotick in an investor release announcing Activision’s first-quarter results. Kotick cited the drop in World of Warcraft users, the poor performance of the Wii U, uncertainty surrounding next-generation consoles and increased competition.

But the long-running MMO World of Warcraft suffered a precipitous drop of 1.3 million subscribers, about 14 percent of its user base, over the course of the quarter. That leaves the game with 8.3 million paying users worldwide — still enough to keep the game in the top spot when it comes to subscription-based massively multiplayer online RPGs. During Activision’s first-quarter investor call this afternoon, Kotick said the company expects World of Warcraft subscribers to be lower by the end of 2013. 

Diablo 3 developer Blizzard Entertainment was hoping to bring back the game’s gold and real-money Auction Houses sometime today, but according to the studio’s most recent estimate, they’ll remain offline for “at least another 24 hours.”

The studio kept the Auction Houses in maintenance mode so existing auctions could expire as it continued to review all transactions, and estimated that it would be able to bring the Auction Houses back sometime today. But in an update posted at 3:10 p.m. ET today, Lylirra said the process is still ongoing.

Blizzard took the Auction Houses offline earlier this week due to a gold duping bug that surfaced on May 7, when it patched Diablo 3 to version 1.0.8. The studio was able to fix the bug that night, but decided to put the servers into maintenance mode so it could perform a complete audit of all transactions made since the release of the patch. The team believed that to be a better choice than having to roll back everyone’s progress.

“We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region,” said Blizzard community manager Lylirra in an update posted at 3 a.m. ET yesterday to the Diablo 3 forums. “We’ve been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections.”

“This audit is a time-intensive process, and to make sure that we can do a thorough job, we’re going to keep the Auction Houses in maintenance until that work is complete,” said Lylirra. “Unfortunately, our previous estimate was incorrect, and for that I personally apologize. We don’t have a new ETA, but we anticipate that the service will be unavailable for at least another 24 hours.”

During a talk at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, Diablo 3 game director Jay Wilson said the real-money Auction Houses “really hurt the game,” and added that Blizzard is still figuring out how to fix them.