Neverwinter Economy Disrupted by Currency Exploit

Michael Dunaway
By Michael Dunaway, News Editor Posted:
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Anyone who's played Neverwinter can tell you just how confusing the MMO's currency system really is. The game utilizes at least 3 separate currencies (not including tokens earned to purchase gear sets) with the most important currency being the Astral Diamond. This is gained from doing daily quests and other means and is used for quite a few of the game's important gear vendors as well as the player auction house. Over the weekend players began exploiting a bug in the auction house which saw an influx of billions of Astral Diamonds into the market. Suddenly the world of Neverwinter was in chaos.

While initially this may seem like a simple fix consider this, Astral Diamonds are able to be traded in exchange for Zen which is Perfect World's real world cash shop currency. The sudden flood of Diamonds meant players were trading in massive amounts of the currency and, in turn, purchasing everything available in the cash shop. All of this meant a huge plummet in the value of Zen leading to Perfect World performing an emergency maintenance which lasted several hours, whereby the publisher initiated a seven hour rollback in order to correct the currency issues.

What this means is, if you played at all yesterday (May 19th) beginning at 5:20AM PST your progression is gone, like it never happened. To make up for this the developers are putting together a package of items to give to everyone. The plan is to distribute the goods sometime this week, possibly on Friday 5/24. On the bright side of things, if you happened to spend any money on ZEN during that period you will be getting all of it back as well.

So just how is Cryptic/Perfect World handling those who participated in the exploit? Several players have stated that they have begun to receive light bans, totalling no more than 72 hours. On Reddit there is even talk of players who exploited the bug and cashed out to make thousands of real world dollars, some of whom say they still have characters acting as mules carrying large quantities of gear that Cryptic studios has yet to remove. Other players have mentioned that the exploit had actually been in the game since closed beta and despite reporting the issue, Cryptic had done nothing to address the bug until it was too late.

For now the Auction House remains offline and no doubt the developers are still in damage control mode attempting to deal with all of the ripple effects the exploit caused. If you're interested in reading the full breakdown on the event and what was affected you can check out the official FAQ here.

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In this article: Neverwinter.

About the Author

Michael Dunaway
Michael Dunaway, News Editor

Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.

More Stories by Michael Dunaway

Discussion (43)

Zack 10 years ago
I used this exploit and never got banned xD owned!

Karnaga 10 years ago
Neverwinter has on big Problem: It's simply bad in any way :)

I HATE PWE 10 years ago
This company its so terrible. I asked them why they banned my account 3 days ago still no message from there support!!!!! I invested real money in this Game and now i just got banned for nothing? This feels like a fraud to me. Thx god i did not buy one of there founders packs. I never will make this mistake again an buy something from PWE. And other players should be carefull to about this company they take your hard earnd money just to close your account 3 days later.

Sza 10 years ago
Feel bad for those who got off in the crossfire because I bet alot of legit people got banned lol..PWE never seazes to amaze me they offer games with innovative ideas but they manage it so bad.

I HATE PWE 10 years ago
They just banned my main account without telling me why. I did not use this exploit i wasnt playing the last days. What is wrong with this Company? I bought ZEN and now i got banned???? For no reason with no message.

Urs0 10 years ago
omg, the sad part is to see the comments!

seriously people? one bug and people saying "pwe just want or money" or "I knew this game would fail"?

Nothing happened, the game is still running, people still playing, this is still a beta and your hate with pwe has NOTHING to do with an exploit of a bug... games have bugs, ALL of them, you people are just using this as an excuse to hate PWE or to hate the game because you didn't like it

grow up people, want to hate PWE, Cryptic or the game? Fine... but don't use something unrelated to your hate to justify it

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LordHikaru 10 years ago
People exploiting something in a game? Say it isn't so. lol

iluvgamez 10 years ago
Thats what u get for ignoring ur Beta Testers feedback and bug reports. I dont feel sorry at all. I did realize after 3 weeks of playing closed beta, that something will happen. They needed ages to fix the forum so we could log in and report bugs. With that experince, im not suprised right now. Its anyways just an avarage game.

GamingMaster 10 years ago
I have seen this problem since the Beta weekends .. i'm suprised they didn't notice it before the game went open beta .. also the game isn't only suffering from this issue but many more. I would think hard if I wish to continue playing Neverwinter in my opinion it is a failure .. The classes are unbalanced and GF - Guardian Fighter and GWF - Great weapon fighter seem to be out of place since they do almost no damage on 5 player dungeon.. It was a big mistake to choose GWF and not TR - Trickster rogue which seems to do more damage than what it should.

The game was never ready for launch since these issues are still going on..

However they did a good job with STO - Star Trek Online but I don't know why they couldn't do it with Neverwinter.

longtimegamer 10 years ago
couldn't have happened to a better company. hope they got taken to the cleaners so badly they have to shut down the entire Perfect World and sell all its assets.

too bad, so sad, I'm glad, be mad, got had, greedy lad

Hi 10 years ago
Can all yall bitches stop calling companies "P2W" when you fags are the ones literally PAYING for their damn game! So stfu and its the communities fault and not the publishers/developers. Good day!

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Stuff 10 years ago
PWE .... I like playing Blacklight : R on and off but other then that I stay away from the other games in fact I have been doing less free to play games as it seems to me it's getting bad with the make a fast buck.

Zhao Yun 10 years ago
*reads comments*,*reads neverwinter forums*, "Wait a few moments while uninstall Nevewinter from your computer"

Clockwerkninja 10 years ago
Neverwinter chose to side with the exploiters over what is best for the game in the long run. Players , including myself are leaving in droves. I am walking away from a founders pack plus considerable cash shop investment. I will never play another Cryptic or PWE game again if the do not wipe those severs.

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Kess 10 years ago
Whaaat?! You can't possibly be implying that PWE's consistent greed has to lead to a massive, easily exploitable hole in their pay-to-win system. Hooligans, I say.

Xepo Stillheart 10 years ago
I have read many posts and visited many sites. I have played this game in early beta and can confirm most of what people are complaining about to be true. This exploit has been there for a long time. It was reported at least a week ago, but apparently was ignored. It is confirmed that they transferred similar code from STO over that was proven to be exploitable. This is an outright failure on the development team to respond to bug reports... heck it is even worse than that, they were completely negligent by using bad code in the first place!

The only reason this blew up into the massive firestorm we see now is because it became more and more viral as people realized how much they could benefit from the exploit and partially because it was ignored for so long like many other glitches and bugs.

Bane 10 years ago
Haha i knew it when i was playing in close beta i notice about this bug and i reported i stop playing due that pwe rip off players with his high price cash shop, i know the second chaos is coming and is duping something that i check last time and is still not being fix!!!!

YTronX 10 years ago
Too slow, this was yesterday

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Extasist 10 years ago
Good

Anon 10 years ago
Heh, after all...it seems this game was just hype...

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Rareloot 10 years ago
I'm not surprised. I uninstalled the game the first day I played it. Extremely boring MMO, and I'm not surprised it's riddled with exploits and a retarded economy. Honestly I don't know how people can tolerate more than 10 minutes of that game. Same with Planetside 2.

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Neosapience 10 years ago
This is a joke. The AH exploit is just one of many that have been around for a very long time. Rolling back the servers 7 hours can't even begin to undo the damage. The only reason they aren't doing a wipe is because it would cost them even more customers.

The game is just screwed. SO many people exploited, and now those players will have nothing to do because there is virtually no end game content. New players aren't going to want to spend money on a game where the player base already has a huge advantage (and didn't even have to pay for it).

I predict a quick, painful death for Neverwinter. Perhaps it will serve as a warning to other MMO companies: don't rush your product.

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Name 10 years ago
lmao! perfect world, this is what you get for never taking the customer truely into consideration! had that shit blow up in your face! all you do is copy and paste these bad systems in to place, and dont even bother catering to the customer!

Humor 10 years ago
It is true though, people have been reporting bugs since Closed Beta, and a good majority of the bugs are STILL around that they have yet to fix.

I don't think this is due to Cryptic, I'm sure they want to fix it ASAP, it's due to the greedy money making hands of Perfect World Entertainment, and trying to make as much money as possible. And now they've noticed people started leaving the game, which to them means less money, and it's only NOW they start handing out bans.

The sad part is, PWE won't actually officially say Neverwinter is "Released", they keep hiding behind their lousy excuse "It's Open Beta". Now players are hiding behind the very same same excuse they use "We only exploit to find bugs, because it's Open Beta!". See the irony here?

Perfect World is a sad company, I'm not even sure how they're still around with the crap they publish. Too bad Cryptic Sold out.

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