Blizzard announced that it will keep the Diablo III auction houses offline for awhile longer as it deals with the aftermath of a gold duping bug that was introduced in a patch released earlier this week. While the nasty little bug that saw a handful of users take advantage and create trillions of in-game gold has been squashed, Blizzard tells the community that it needs a little more time to audit players who may have used the exploit and made transactions in the auction houses.

The new Diablo III update has caused the game's in-game economy to go a little bit crazy after some enterprising (unscrupulous?) players found and exploited a gold duping bug. The problems with the game's economy forced Blizzard to shut down the game's auction house temporarily. According to some reports, the problems with the patch have enabled some players to generate "trillions" in gold. One post in the Battle.net forums claims that a user managed to amass a whopping 371 trillion gold using the exploit.

If you are interested in using some third-party video game hacks that you happened upon in the darker corners of the Internet, then you might want to think twice before using it. According to a report by AVG Viruslab Research Group, almost 90 percent of all video game hacks contain malware, putting gamers’ systems at risk.

Riot Games announced on the League of Legends forums that it has sanctioned several professional League of Legends players for engaging in what it calls "Elo-Boosting." Elo-Boosting is when one player stands in and plays on another player's client to artificially improve that person's Elo rating. Elo is a system that calculates a player's relative skill level. Mucking about with that system is apparently a pretty serious offense.

Cheaters never prosper, get banned and don't get a refund in The Castle Doctrine, an indie online game where players protect their "castles" and families from other players by decking it out with various hazards to ward of thieves. Developer Jason Rohrer has banned the first player from the alpha version of his online game The Castle Doctrine, and he says that anyone who uses the source code to create cheats or exploits a bug during the alpha test will be banned from play and not receive the early adopter $8 fee they paid.

Blizzard has banned "several thousand" Diablo III players for using bots, according to this Battle.net forum thread. In announcing the bans, Blizzard said that these kinds of acts (using cheats and exploits) are "undermining the spirit of fair play," and that the company plans to release new tools in the early part of 2013 that make it easier for players to report bad player behavior and cheating to Blizzard.

Blizzard community manager Lylirra announced the bans on the Battle.net forums:

Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley wants cheaters to know that he will hunt them down to the ends of the earth and ban them from the recently launched first-person sci-fi online shooter PlanetSide 2. Smedley took to Twitter to let the community know that he will not let cheaters ruin the game for everyone else.

Riot Games has issued a final determination on those teams they alleged cheated this past weekend in the third day of the Season 2 League of Legends World Playoff Matches. Riot has concluded that Korean team Azubu Frost is guilty of unsportsmanlike conduct and will be fined 20 percent of its winnings. The fine will be donated to a Riot Games charity in Korea.

Riot Games revealed in this forum thread that its MOBA game League of Legends had recently been the victim of a DDoS attack at the hands of a handful of very naughty players. The company said that a recent hotfix has taken care of some of the trouble and has kept the game from dying, though the company admitted that players in a targeted game session will still experience some lag and possible disconnection. Still, the game will reconnect and pick up where it left off if that happens, they say.

While developers are often credited with doing their best to punish bad player behavior and cheating within their online gaming communities, it's rare that anyone gets rewarded or even acknowledged for engaging in good and often helpful behavior. Riot Games hopes to change that with a new "Honor System" for its popular MOBA game League of Legends. Below are the details from the League of Legend forums:

While the high levels of cheating in Battlefield 3 might have been curtailed to some degree since its launch on various platforms, it's still a problem and the "report" button on the game's Battlelog is a button push that leads to nowhere. Well apparently EA Dice has finally decided to fix the problem, if you believe this brief report on fan site BF3 Blog (for the record, I do).

Episode 18 of the Super Podcast Action Committee sees host Andrew Eisen team up with GP Managing Editor James Fudge, who sat in for E.

Showing its continued resolve against those who are not following the rules, ArenaNet has permanently banned around 3,000 accounts for using an exploit in its recently released online role-playing game, Guild Wars 2. The exploit in question involves an in-game vendor that "incorrectly" sells items at incredibly low prices.

Major League Gaming announced that it is withholding the prizes and titles for the top two League of Legends teams that played at this weekend’s MLG Summer Championships. The pro gaming league said in a statement that the two teams engaged in acts of "collusion."

"MLG regrets to announce that we will not be awarding 1st or 2nd Place finishes for the Summer Championship League of Legends Event," the company said in a statement. "We have determined that there was collusion between the two final teams, Curse NA and Team Dignitas."

An update on Battle.net confirms that Blizzard has squashed two exploits that gave players unlimited health and invulnerability while playing two character classes in Diablo III - even in online game sessions.

Even as Blizzard promises that a hotfix is on the way to deal with the Wizard invincibility exploit in Diablo III that was uncovered yesterday, players have found another one related to the Barbarian class. Blizzard finally responded to news that an exploit with the Wizard class gave players savvy enough to make it work temporary invulnerability - even in multiplayer games.

According to a post on the Battle.net forums, Blizzard plans to limit the number of games a player can create within a given timeframe to combat the use of bots. The company did not detail the number of games, nor the time frame in which players would be limited - that roast is still in the proverbial oven. Whatever the parameters are, this change will happen in the "near future."

One of the reasons that the game cheat industry collapsed was because Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft created systems that had varying degrees of connectivity to online, achievements, and multiplayer. That's why products like the original Game Geneie from Galoob and the GameShark have long since died. But Hyperkin is jumping headfirst into the abandoned space with a brand new Game Genie. You may fondly remember the Game Genie as a popular cheat device for such consoles as the Sega Genesis and the Nintendo Entertainment System.