Blizzard is turning a bad situation into a good one by donating the money made from a money duping bug in the real money auction to a children's charity. Diablo III production director John Hight announced via the game's official forums this weekend the charitable contribution to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. He said that those who made money of the exploit would have their ill-gotten gains donated as well as its transaction fee that it charges in the real-money auction for the game. The company did not disclose just how much money was made off of the glitch:

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.

World of Tanks developer Wargaming.net has filed a lawsuit against Changyou.com and Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co. in the United States Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit alleges that the defendant(s) "stole" Wargaming.net's intillectual property to create an online tank game called "Project Tanks" that is "disturbingly similar" to World of Tanks. Wargaming.net is using the law firm Banner & Witcoff, Ltd.

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.

According to data collected from a consumer survey conducted by research firm NPD Group, 72 percent of those who play games say that they do so online. The data comes from NPD Group's Online Gaming 2013 report, which surveyed 8,800 self-described gamers earlier in the year about their preferences and gaming habits.

Ultimate Poker is the first online game to use real-world money in the United States. Of course players who want to take it for a spin will have to be physically located in the state where this game is legal to play: Nevada. Sometime today UltimatePoker.com is expected to launch the country’s first official fully legal online poker site where players can wager real-world money for the very first time.

Valve Software announced that the very first game to make use of its freshly launched support for subscriptions is the MMO Darkfall Unholy Wars, with "additional subscription-based games to follow."

EVE Online maker CCP Games today announced the final schedule of events for its sold-out annual fan celebration, EVE Fanfest (April 25-27). Playing up this year's "Second Decade" theme (which commemorates the 10th anniversary of EVE Online) CCP has managed to bring some pretty interesting speakers to the event this year including Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams, and Paola Antonell from MOMA.

Dark Souls has now sold more than 2.3 million copies worldwide, according to developer From Software (by way of NeoGAF and Gpara). From Software president Eiichi Nakajima announced the sales figures on stage this week at an event for Japanese press, attended by Gpara. He also announced that the sequel to the popular hardcore action RPG, Dark Souls 2 would be coming to the Xbox 360.

South Korean gamers are getting upset that servers for Riot Games' League of Legends in the country have spent more time under maintenance or facing downtime in the last month than being operational.

Valve's popular MOBA game DOTA 2 has officially surpassed Riot Games' League of Legends as the most played in the West in the first quarter of this year, according to data collected by research firm DFC Intelligence. The report, which covers PC gaming in North America and Europe, is based on the DFC Intelligence PC Game Meter service. It combines data from multiple sources, including real-time stats from Xfire's 23 million users.

The Zombie survival MMO The War Z has been taken offline after an unknown hacker mucked about in the game's database and compromised personal player data, according to a message from publisher OP Productions. The message, which appears when you try to go to the War Z forums tells players that the game has been taken down and that the hack is being investigated. The publisher also says that those who might have been affected by the hack have been informed.

An interesting story via the Huffington Post (based on this CBC report) details sexual predators in the United States using online games and consoles to talk to children in Canada. This particular report focuses on Winnipeg, but it's not far-fetched to imagine that if it's happening in one province, it's happening to some degree in other provinces as well.

Richard Garriott's Portalarium announced that it is now accepting PayPal payments for the Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues crowd funding campaign. The PayPal option is available on the Shroud of the Avatar site.

When Diablo 3 lands on the PS3 and PS4 it won't have some of the features or the requirements that its PC counterpart currently has. According to Polygon, a Blizzard official told them at PAX East this weekend that Diablo 3 will not require a constant internet connection in order to play.

Blizzard's first foray into free-to-play isn't an MMO, or an online action or strategy game - it's a collectible card game based on the popular Warcraft universe. Today at PAX East (even as it was showing off a special build of Diablo III for PS3), Blizzard revealed a free-to-play strategy card game for Windows, Mac, and iPad called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Richard Garriott posted a lengthy explanation of a PC Gamer interview that was published yesterday in which he said that "most game designers really just suck," and that he had not met anyone who he thought came close to being as good a game designer as he was.

Fans of Level-5's 2010 RPG White Knight Chronicles will be sad to hear that Sony is pulling the plug on online game servers June 18. A tweet about the same thing happening to White Knight Chronicles 2 online servers from the official PlayStation Twitter account was tweeted but has since disappeared.

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.

SimCity's "always-online requirement" may have irritated consumers at launch, but by most accounts anyone that reads this or any other gaming web site was well aware that the game would require a constant Internet connection in order to play (EA made that fact clear quite awhile ago).

As much as EA and Maxis want to smooth things over with fans and make them happy, this latest blog post from Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw isn't being received very well, if you believe the comments following the article.

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.

A new SimCity mod detailed in a YouTube video and later explained in-depth on a Reddit thread reveals that it is possible to play SimCity offline indefinitely with a few important caveats. Despite those caveats the mod shows that the game can easily be transitioned from an "always connected" game to an offline single player game, despite what both EA and Maxis have said. According to modder UKAzzer he was able to do this with a little bit of work and by enabling the game's secret debug mode. This allowed him to turn off the disconnection timer limit.

Yesterday notable indie developer Jason Rohrer (best known for such indie titles as The Passage and Sleep Is Death) quietly started taking early orders for his next game, The Castle Doctrine. The Castle Doctrine is an online focused game where the player must protect his spouse and children from home invaders.

Mojang is working on a new service called Minecraft Realms, which it hopes will give those players interested in subscribing their own special little corner of the Minecraft universe.

An interesting story on The Verge quoting Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman reported that the $99 Android-based home console set to launch in June (for those who didn't back its Kickstarter crowd funding campaign) would not have multiplayer capabilities at launch. Obviously this message was not well received by the gaming community and the company quickly clarified it's CEO's statement saying that it was a mistake. First, Uhrman comments:

Microsoft, who is not all that good at adding free-to-play games to its Xbox Live service for Xbox 360 (there are only a couple at this point), is probably happy that it allowed the free-to-play and kid-friendly MOBA game Happy Wars to launch on the platform in October of last year. As of today the game has been downloaded over 2 million times, according to maker Toylogic. While the game is completely free to download and play, players can purchase "Happy tickets" with real money to upgrade equipment and buy vanity items.

On this week's show, hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the first Tropes vs. Women video, "Bronies" and if rights holders should be a little kinder to fan projects, and the nightmarish launch of SimCity this week. Download Episode 44 now: SuperPAC Episode 44 (1 hour, 6 minutes) 60.4 MB.

While Richard Garriott (also known as Lord British in most circles) may no longer hold the rights to the Ultima series of classic CRPG games or Ultima Online (he sold it, along with Origin over a decade ago) that hasn't stopped him from returning to his roots. Today Garriott announced that his Austin-based studio Portalarium is hard at work on his newest game, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a sort-of spiritual sequel of sorts to the Ultima series, but set in a whole new universe.

Last night SimCity Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis posted a statement on the EA forums addressing the ongoing issues with the game and players' complaints that servers are continually inaccessible.