How do people ever get enough SOJ to summon diablo clone?

I was reading it takes 75-120 to summon him. even at players 8, that is 10-15 each. That just seems like an unreasonable quantity...

When that whole thing started, there was a lot of duping going around.
Nowadays,you can do IP hunting to try to maximuse the number of games in which a clone spawns, but I don't know what the achievable ratio between sojs / clone games is.

Nowadays you meet with a a bunch of players (like 100) and do ip runs until everybody is at the same server. Then you start selling sojs and everybody gets an anni - price is 1-2 soj pp

Wanna add: It is totaly dumb cause these ip runs (relogin until you get the right server) are crashing the servers. Even in the old times with dupes that was a dumb idea (server crashes + now ppl need to dupe).

yeah, there is a bit of history involved with summoning dclone.

Way back in the early days of diablo 2, there was an item dupe problem. People were always finding new ways of duping things. Blizzard would fix one and two more would pop up. A main problem was that items didn't have any unique identifiers in their database and blizzard had no way to identify what items were duped and which were not. Eventually they solved this with patch 1.10 in late 2003 by essentially stamping an 'invisible serial number' to every item that ever dropped into their database. The serialization is not visible client-side, so players do not see it and it is an invisible dupe prevention/management method. From that point on, if an item were ever to be duped, then they could tell right away that it was a dupe because the serial number of the items would be duped as well and they would see duplicates. If two copies of the same item ever appeared in the same game then one or both (I forget exactly) would be deleted, removing the duped item from the economy.

Problem was that the above serialization of items only applied to items that dropped after they added the serialization. They had no way of knowing what items dropped before this serialization were legit or duped, so all items in existence prior to this serialization were seen as legitimate to this system. And since the SoJ was the smallest item in the inventory (taking up just 1x1 inventory space, like all other rings), it kind of became the defacto currency. People just continued to dupe these pre-serialization SoJs to create new pre-serialization SoJs, undetectable to the server's dupe-detection system and therefore permanent.

Back in the day, you wouldn't offer runes for an item. You'd offer SoJs. Lots of them - items would commonly go for 30-40 SoJs, sometimes way more. People had entire accounts full of SoJs for trading. I had about 10 entire mules full of them myself way back when. It was common to have hundreds of SoJs. I think I remember paying like 20 SoJs for a

Stormshield or something. I don't remember, it's been like ~20 years. But that's kind of how things went back then.

Blizzard had a problem on their hands - Even if they solved duping issues over time, people had already spawned untold thousands (millions?) of permanent duped SoJs that they couldn't detect. They had solved the problem of people duping new items because newly dropped items were serialized. However, they needed players to start deleting these old undetectable SoJs to remove them from the economy. To do this, they created this mechanism to summon DClone - compelling players to willingly delete mass amounts of SoJs and slowly solve this issue over time.

This seemed effective. Over time, the SoJ stopped being the currency of choice on battlenet and people slowly adopted the rune economy we use today. I'm not sure if this alone caused people to get off the SoJ system. Every fresh ladder from there on was fresh, serialized, and lacked the "Duped SoJ" currency, and this probably helped too. But it was definitely part of the reason the SoJ stopped being the "in-game Diablo Dollar" that it once was.

This situation does not exist in D2R. All items that have ever dropped across the entirety of D2R have been serialized. We do not have millions of duped SoJs floating around. This mechanism does not seem appropriate now. I think the spawn mechanic should definitely be changed, but I haven't seen any blueposts talking about it. For now the only people who realistically get to hunt DClone are organized cabals in discord channels where a bunch of multiboxers coordinate server IPs to dump loads of SoJs into so they can farm annis.

Thanks for your very good and accurate explanation!

Beardozer wrote: 2 years ago

I think the spawn mechanic should definitely be changed, but I haven't seen any blueposts talking about it.

Not a blue post per-se, but they wrote in a blog post, that they are aware of the DClone situation and are looking for changing how the spawn works.
They specifically adressed that the IP-system is not appropriate even more. No ETA given.
It sounded like "not this patch, but it's on our todo list".

Trollwut wrote: 2 years ago

Not a blue post per-se, but they wrote in a blog post, that they are aware of the DClone situation and are looking for changing how the spawn works.
They specifically adressed that the IP-system is not appropriate even more. No ETA given.
It sounded like "not this patch, but it's on our todo list".

Yeah I really hope so. Maybe use the

Standard of Heroes to spawn DClone instead. Or something like that, but this mechanic hails from a time when everybody realistically had a couple hundred SoJs to spare and that's just not the case anymore.

Thanks for the history lesson Bear Who knew there was so much background for what i thought was an arbitrary number. It is one of the things i love about this game that I keep stumbling across new rabbitholes of backstory for seemingly minor things.

Seamus McNugget wrote: 2 years ago

Thanks for the history lesson Bear Who knew there was so much background for what i thought was an arbitrary number. It is one of the things i love about this game that I keep stumbling across new rabbitholes of backstory for seemingly minor things.

For real man, this game is so old that is has a verbal history to be preserved through posterity, lmao.

"Back in my day, we had to farm

Mephisto uphill both ways to afford 120 SoJs to buy my bugged Oculus ring..." (yeah at one point somebody created a bugged ring with the

Stone of Jordan name and but the stats of

The Oculus on it and that got duped to hell and back too, lol)

selling SOJ to ingame NPC is wasteful. Some players have never found one in their lifetime.

this event needs to be fixed as newcomers will never understand why Anni charm event is almost impossible for them without trading and joining discord groups, while back in the day, old timers had mules of SOJ as Beardozer mentioned.

the purpose of SOJ is to +1 to all skills, not DClone.

I hope the devs are doing something about this before 2.4 launches.

annoynimous wrote: 2 years ago

selling SOJ to ingame NPC is wasteful. Some players have never found one in their lifetime.

Can confirm. I have never found a soj drop. Started since legacy d2 release.

D2R drops seem different from legacy d2, i'm finally finding things that i've never been able to find before. For once, i feel like an soj is just 1 more andy pop away.

Beardozer wrote: 2 years ago

For real man, this game is so old that is has a verbal history to be preserved through posterity, lmao.

What a concept, a d2 history/historian would be pretty sweet.