Diablo 4 player spends 30 billion gold on a crossbow, in-game economy in shambles

Diablo 4
(Image credit: Activision / Blizzard)

Diablo 4’s in-game economy has been in shambles thanks to a gold and item duplication exploit, which has now been fixed by Blizzard.

They say that money makes the world go round, and while I don’t know who ‘they’ are and don’t particularly want to agree with their sentiment, there’s no doubt that you certainly hold a lot of power in Diablo 4 if you have an endless amount of gold at your disposal. As PC Gamer reports, this was illustrated perfectly by the antics of one player who recently bid all the gold they could in an attempt to buy a shiny new crossbow, in what might be the priciest in-game trade ever.

While it’s now been patched out, players were previously able to replicate their gold thanks to a glitch associated with the game’s in-game trading function. This meant that individuals were quickly able to amass millions, if not billions of gold without really having to work that hard for it, and it was this currency that players were bringing along to unofficial Discord auctions in order to get their hands on the best gear possible.

The 30 billion gold crossbow incident has gone viral online thanks to a YouTube video showcasing how the whole interaction went down - it was one Discord user named ‘Poor guy’ (who definitely didn’t live up to their name), who truly meant it when they said that they’d give “as much as you want”.

So, was the crossbow worth it? That’s debatable - compared to the other crossbow Poor guy already owned, its item power was actually seven points lower, although it did offer slightly higher Core Skill Damage and Vulnerable Damage.

Trading in Diablo 4 was temporarily disabled this week due to the duplication shenanigans, although it’s been enabled again now that the exploit has been fixed. Blizzard hasn’t stated if it’s removed any unfairly obtained items or gold from players, although it did warn that “any account that engages in gold and item duplication exploits will be actioned in accordance with our End User License Agreement”.

Be sure to take a look at our list of the best PC games for more titles to add to your library. You can also check out our selection of the best RPGs.

Catherine Lewis
News Writer, TechRadar Gaming

Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.