The last message on dclone status I saw today

Got lucky today on the third time to have a running hell game when dclone popped up on US non-ladder non-hardcore server. I missed the first two occurrences as each time the last message I saw on dclone status was " Terror begins to form within Sanctuary", including the last one. Yet, dclone was running right where I found him. Is there a known problem with dclone status messaging on battle.net?

Yes, there are several known bugs with both the /uberdiablo command and the status messages themselves (not appearing in the game chat log).

The following post by Schnorki from 1½ years ago describes some of them:
forums/psa-uberdiablo-bugged-t924064.html
(no, they haven't been fixed, as far as I know)

There is also a (more recent?) known problem where the servers themselves get messed up and report different status to different people, where restarting your client could make you see the wrong status, and it becomes near impossible to know the "true" status. This just happened on Asia SCNL yesterday, with people fighting over which status was correct and some even making threads here complaining about other people falsely misreporting.

And then there's the problem where your game simply does not display the status messages at all in the chat log. When this happens, using the /uberdiablo command may give you the correct (updated) status, but unless you used the command regularly or (better yet) always made sure to check some super unique before leaving a game you could miss walks, because the progression messages that are supposed to appear automatically in your chat simply don't so you wouldn't know that a walk happened.

I too had Dclone come into my game today without any warning,but there he was in act 5

@ShadowHeart: Thank you for sharing. I'm curious now why this problem revealed itself for the first time only yesterday for me, as I've been playing the game since the end of March this year, and everything was fine until yesterday.

Hard to say, really. I've had the game chat without messages happen to me several times during this summer (but put in comparison to the number of walks I've caught in total this ladder, it's been less than 1% of walks). It happened to a lot of people on ladder for a few weeks (there was lots of talk about it at the D2R Clone Hunters Discord server). The incorrect status thing has also happened several times this summer. Maybe ladder is more impacted by these problems due to having more walks overall, I don't know.

bigbikefan wrote: 3 years ago

@ShadowHeart: Thank you for sharing. I'm curious now why this problem revealed itself for the first time only yesterday for me, as I've been playing the game since the end of March this year, and everything was fine until yesterday.

Coincidence + less people.

The issues seem to be amplified when servers are more taxed (anecdotal evidence from high-load times). Since the playerbase seemingly dropped a fair bit overall, you'd then expect these issues to also become at least slightly less common.

Additionally, the "some affected, some not" seemed very much tied to the sub-servers within regions, the selection of which is supposedly based entirely on your location (capacity permitting). So depending on where you live, you may simply usually end up usually connecting to one of the more stable ones.

And lastly, you don't even know.
Specifically regarding the issue of "no message but a walk regardless", you'd only actually confirm that happening to you if/when you do go looking for dclone (be that intentional or unintentional) and find him despite no message. I'll go out on a limb and say you've had plenty of games where you didn't always check a new super unique spawn before leaving, meaning you may well have had the issue happen plenty of times before, you simply didn't know and left a game with a 'hidden' dclone in it.