Diablo Clone

This comment was written before patch 2.4 region Dclone walking. Now, DClone walks are super common and Annihilus worth pretty much nothing, so a very different issue than before

Interesting insight on Diablo Clone Walks by Mirrormn

I've participated a little bit in the back rooms where DClone walks are getting organized, so let me tell you exactly what has been going on:

People are using firewall rules and running on specific regions (Europe or Asia/Mumbai) to target specific sets of IPs. This may be why casual NA users do not ever see DClone walk on their own.

"Multis" are WAY easier to set up than in original Diablo 2. This is because in original Diablo 2, you needed a different IP address for each client you were connecting with, while in D2R, you only need a unique account for each new client. There are programs out there that allow you to launch multiple clients on a single computer - they're not popularly discussed because there is a profit motive in preventing casuals from doing this, so most people who know how to do it have no reason to teach anyone else. But they're out there, and freely available.

A single Anni is worth more than an entire copy of D2R (roughly, prices keep changing over time, and methods of converting items into real money have different efficiency, but this certainly is true in many cases). This means that the profit motive for getting additional clients into DClone walks is roughly unlimited. For each copy of D2 you buy, if you can get a single additional Anni out of it, it basically has already paid off.

People who organize walks have no way of knowing how many clients you're bringing. People who have tons of clients benefit paying a small buy-in and then trying to squeeze their 10-20+ clients into the one hot IP. There is a huge profit motive in doing this, and no real way to stop it.

Because multi-client users are trying to use up all the spots on a hot server, single-client users who pay SoJs to buy in have a higher chance of getting screwed and not finding a game.

Also, because the multi-clienters farm Annis so hard and have them in bulk, they've depressed the market to the point where an Anni is worth less than 2 SoJs.

As these trends continue, it becomes less and less viable for "traditional" DClone hunting - where you have a single client, pay 2 SoJs, and get 1 Anni out of it - to run at all. Traditional DClone hunting is basically dead at this point as a result.

Instead, there is a new method of DClone hunting where a single person collects 100+ clients that they control entirely; they privately choose an IP and get all their clients onto that IP without telling anyone else about it; and then they sell these games to people for a set SoJ price (last I saw was 3 SoJs for 2 games), and do the walk once they've collected everyone's SoJs. The one person in control of everything passes out as many games as they need to to raise the SoJs needed for the walk, and then any clients/games they have beyond that are pure profit. As far as I know, this is the only form of DClone walking (beyond large public events done by streamers) that is viable right now.

So, we've reached a point where Annis are basically completely controlled by an extremely small number of people (I know of ~4, perhaps there are more) who can afford to invest thousands of dollars into running over 100 copies of D2R at a time. Of course, these people almost certainly sell all/most of their Annis for real money, because why else would you invest so much money into the scheme to begin with?

Everything that was originally interesting or fun about DClone walking is completely broken now. It was already in a pretty terrible place when D2R released because of the high price of SoJs (since there are no duped ones hanging around now), but the paradigm that has evolved out of the capability to run an unlimited number of clients on a single IP address has destroyed even the niche community of DClone hunting that used to exist.

The whole mechanic is completely non-functional now. If Blizzard allows Ladder to go live with current DClone mechanics, the only thing they will accomplish is to make these people who have invested in these 100+ client setups very very rich, as they will be in a position to control the vast majority of Ladder Annis in the whole world. It needs to be changed.

girl this is NOT how i planned on learning about this occurrence I was just minding my own business doing a countess run and instead of her i get this yoked to hell diablo come crushin thru my skellies