Dupes in the game?

Yeah... gotta say of all things, Shako would be a very odd choice to dupe. xD

IF I was going to dupe something, I would choose something a bit more liquid, like Ist or the obvious Soj...

Jumping into a trade with a bunch of Ber or Jah would be suspicious AF, & same with any valuable unique. Common currency items would be the go-to if this was happening en masse for sure.

BillyMaysed wrote: 4 years ago

I have personally watched several D2R streamers find TONS of GG items in the first couple days of launch. If you spend 8-10 hours a day, it really isn't that hard to find the good stuff.

Unless RNGesus hates your guts with sadistic Passion. Trust me, I know what I am talking about. We've been worst enemies for 20 years!

That being said .... regarding OP's question ....

Dupes have been back pretty much since D2R launch and currently there are at least 2 methods I know of that still work (don't even think about asking). However, there are - AFAIK - limitations. I don't think you are likely to see item dupes floating around. Not even SOJs. You will see a lot HR dupes being used for runewords. The moment you make a runeword the item gets one new ID and the dupes basically no longer exist. If you think someone gave you a duped rune keep it in the shared stash and do not enter/exit games with it in your inventory or personal stash. I am not sure if this still works but I not aware of a fix. This is also part of a dupe method.

Your Shako is almost definitely not a dupe. My best guess is that the trader was simply inexperienced.

As @BillyMaysed pointed out, there are millions of ppl farming for stuff every second. And then there are legions of bots farming for stuff. Don't underestimate the amount of stuff a couple hundred bots running 24/7 will cough up. If you wanted SOJs you would just run a whole bunch of bots doing Andariel on nightmare.

Bots are probably the biggest source of pretty much everything in the game. Commercial item sellers, even entire wholesale companies but also a lot of ppl that just run a single bot while they sleep or work.

Luckily you can decide for yourself if you want to play in the vast open community or play in a closed community with no outside trading. I play in a small (30ish ppl) community on playstation with absolutely no outside trades and that creates a VERY different economy which is quite fun.

I hope I could add a bit if perspective to the whole "where is all this coming from, are dupes back ?" question.