You’d best put seat belts on your ears, because I’m going to take them for the ride of their life. Perfect World Entertainment are in the midst of some very heavy damage control after an exploit popped up in Neverwinter and threw the game’s economy into turmoil. I won’t go into details about the exploit itself, partially because I would probably butcher the explanation, but the exploit involves the auction house and players duplicating mass quantities of astral diamonds and converting them into Zen.
According to MMO Fallout’s men on the field, the gateway has been shut down, and the ability to buy Zen with astral diamonds has been disabled. Some of those services may be turned back on by the time you read this. Perfect World has posted the following update on their forums:
We currently are in the process of taking action against a subset of accounts that were confirmed to have utilized exploits that affected the game balance or economy.
These accounts may be banned, temporarily or permanently, depending on the severity of exploit utilization. Anyone who is affected by this will receive notification via email.
While we have taken all precautions necessary to ensure that no false positives made it into our final list of accounts to take action against, we do acknowledge that some players who were banned may wish to follow up with us. If you had an account banned and wish to escalate the issue to our support team, please create a ticket at support.perfectworld.com or send an email to customerservice@perfectworld.com
Please note that forum discussions about specific accounts being banned is against our forum guidelines, thus any threads on the topic may be closed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.
Thank you for your patience and support while we continue to do everything in our power to ensure that Neverwinter remains a fair and balanced game experience.
-Dezstravus and the Neverwinter Team
(Source: Neverwinter)
MMO Fallout 
Only shutting down AH and gateway at first was a bad idea. While the servers were otherwise still up, exploiters had plenty of time to start disposing of AD and filtering it through other accounts. Makes it harder and take longer to track all of the guilty accounts down (not to mention the poor idiots who likely got involved and had no idea what was going on), thus making the fix take even longer.