[Rant] On the issue of the (alleged) dupes

I know what you are all thinking, here we go again.... And yep that is another rant post if you do not want to read these you can skip to a different topic now and not waste any time.

I just thought I would address the elephant in the room and try to give it a bit more publicity than it has already received. Yes, I know this is not a blizzard forum and my rant here is pointless, but let us face it, a post on battle.net is equally as much of a scream in the void as is this one. I will address that at the end of the post.

So as many of you have noticed less than three weeks into ladder the D2R economy is not near what it was compared to three weeks into launch. I am not saying that the economy is fully crashed, it has not. Trades are being made (still) all the time and hopefully, we get to keep this for a few more weeks. However.... Has anyone noticed anything weird with one particular item **cough, cough, SoJ**.

Hear me out right... The reason why I decided to make this post is that the Asian community, as far as I am aware, have managed to get 5 DC walks in the past 2 days. Let's say it is 100 SoJs on average per walk, that is 500 SoJs sold in the past two days, all coming from the same region. Three of the five walks were organized by communities of a single country. Again, people might be getting lucky and they may have been saving up SoJs for quite some time, but agree with me that something seems suspicious. Also, do not get me wrong as much as anyone else I also enjoy the free anis and think it is better this way than the old IP hunting, but if we only get these benefits because someone has found a way to exploit the game, I am not really happy with the result :c. Would much rather not have an anni again for 4 months than to have 5 stashed thanks to dupped SoJs.

We are all aware that bots exist, sadly that is the fact. There is even a streamer showcasing their (single player) bot. As for the bigger names in the community some youtubers like dwarf lord and coooley have already voiced their concerns about the potential botters and duppers. What I would like to see is more of the community, bigger names and in general just a bigger volume of people talking about it. Once we are all aware that it happens and that it IS happening, perhaps, Blizzard might be more inclined to do something about that if they do not want everyone to resort back to playing single player only. Or Lan with friends, but that is no longer possible in D2R, is it, Blizzard?? Thanks for removing the Lan because it brought potential "exploit" opportunities. As we can all see, you are doing such a fantastic job with bringing game exploits to a minimum (:

/fin rant


As I said earlier, I am aware that this is not the official battle.net forum but I have sour experience with the company on their forums already. Seems like threads there just quickly become memes or +1 comments, arguments, or other topics that bring no real meaning to the original post. As for the Blizzard devs and them taking a stance on any of their issues, lol, twitter might be a better place to reach them out than their own forum (as we have seen in the past).

So a post here is equally as "useful" as one in the "official" forums, except... Here I like the community more and it has proven not once that we can conjure up some nice and meaningful conversations. And no, I am not looking for a resolution, or demanding that it is fixed right now, although it would be nice this is not the intention of my post. My goal here is to bring more awareness, share my opinion, see what others think, and hopefully, just hopefully this can be a prelude to everyone becoming more vocal and Blizzard actually starting to pay some attention to us again. Either that, or we would wait for the Microsoft overlords to take over. Company has proven multiple times that their work environment is way less toxic and have shown that they care about the community, so fingers crossed.

I will agree that generally speaking, Blizzard needs to get their s*** together and finally do something against all of the annoying crap they (unlike most other game devs) have never managed to do anything against in multiple decades now. Spambots. Farming bots. Dupes back in the day. Potentially dupes now. They merely prove over and over again that frankly, they just don't give a damn.

That having been said, I am not convinced there really is a duping method out (yet). I'm sure there is one somewhere somehow because believing otherwise would mean to believe that Blizz finally fixed all of that but years and years have taught me not to believe that one.

In terms of it being public though, the evidence so far is really quite circumstantial. The trading economy isn't nearly as "ruined" as people make it out to be. It is merely ruined in very specific trading hubs, largely due to people having gotten into the habit of massively undercutting to sell faster which then starts an unstoppable avalanche of downward pricing. Annis on this site are the best example of that. I still have my posts for normal pricing up here and still sell them for those prices but never actually on this site because some folks have decided that they want a quicker turnaround and just sell everything for 1/3 of the last sale or whathaveyou.

Beyond that, the only evidence that I for one have seen is
a) a suspicious amount of the same piece of gear on that there FG hub
b) a surprising uprising of public walks from Asia over the last ~week

As far as (a) is concerned, I really don't see that as evidence. Sure, there's more from one person than you might expect but if farmers have bots running (those definitely do exist) and pool their findings to a seller or two then those numbers of repeat items are nothing surprising, without any duping involved.

And as for (b), I admittedly kind of jumped to the same "I wonder..." conclusion as well but have since changed my assumptions.
Firstly, yes, they suddenly started hosting public walks known here which we didn't have before and they suddenly increased the number of walks originating there as well but all in all, they still haven't triggered significantly more walks than the Americas did. So if Americas can pool to do that, why can't Asia?
What's more is if you actually followed the streams, a few things stood out:

1) The SoJs were covering all icon variations so IF they are duped, they're not duping the same one over and over but are going out of their way to dupe multiple different ones.

2) More than one of the streamers had an "SoJ exchange" for viewers happening beforehand, allowing folks to trade theirs for one with a different icon. Now, IF these SoJs were duped, that would result in a whole lot of rings going poof on Asia very soon which will not only ruin the streamer's reputation and piss off their audience to no end but will also make it blatantly obvious that a duping method does exist and that Blizz needs to intervene. If they actually had a still secret method to dupe things, I highly doubt they would go out of their way to offer irrefutable proof to everyone by sending those rings out into the world (and then still selling the non-duped ones they traded for them to walk).

3) Most (if not all?) of the Asian streamers who hosted recent walks made it a point to mention that these are neither their SoJs nor community SoJs but that they are in fact sponsored by certain (trading) platforms. The whole thing is basically a giant commercial. And considering how many SoJs those platform teams will have, due to underlying bot farms, sponsoring a few walks to get the word out for their site is by no means a high cost, that's just cheap advertising. Even without any duping involved.

4) At least one of the streamers (on two counts) left, switched regions and made a new game multiple times. Had all those SoJs been dupes, they should've gone poof at that point. At least one of those was without prior "SoJ exchange" so no sneaky switching all of them beforehand.

I did do some research just for good measure and supposedly, there's at least 4 different methods that I was able to dig up. As of today though, none of them actually work.

So yeah, I'm not convinced yet. But I also wouldn't be surprised. Either way, Blizz needs to finally do something about the crap that's been poisoning D2 for over 20 years now.

I feel the same really, it's kind disheartening, but I also kind expected it.
Not only it's bad for the market economy (like if RMT and FG wasn't bad enough already), but also for the possibility that our traded items might just poofs.

That why, from the start of D2R, I only trusted my drops and 100% self-made RWs to be secure and legit... Like 'old LoD.
At this point, traded Wealth is just fuel for future Ubers runs and GC cubing.

My friends don't really think that way (they trade with FG)...
One seems to have quit D2R for the past few days, and maybe not return.



Edit: removed direct mentions of a certain website.

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

The reason why I decided to make this post is that the Asian community, as far as I am aware, have managed to get 5 DC walks in the past 2 days. Let's say it is 100 SoJs on average per walk, that is 500 SoJs sold in the past two days, all coming from the same region.

Just want to point out that the 'Asia region' is split into several servers from what I've heard - one being for mainland China, and the other for Korea/Taiwan/South-eastern nations. I'm not sure how this affects mechanics - for example, could it be that there are simply twice the amount of available SoJ for spawning in the meta-region of Asia due to this split?

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

That having been said, I am not convinced there really is a duping method out (yet). I'm sure there is one somewhere somehow because believing otherwise would mean to believe that Blizz finally fixed all of that but years and years have taught me not to believe that one.

I had a good look through the typical places that RMTers buy/sell dupes, exploits, and bots but couldn't find anything specifically for duping items in D2R yet. Plenty of auto-pickers and straight-up automated run bots already, as expected , but nothing to do with duping yet that I've seen. The exploit could be out there in the wild, but only underground access, or perhaps it hasn't been found yet at all, which is why I think it's sensible that OP put 'alleged' in the topic title.

Bots are actually up and running right now though on battle.net - search 'diablo 2 resurrected hacks' (but be careful what you click) - there is a thriving Black market for these already. They mentioned that they would be attempting to crack down specifically on botting, duping etc, and that the new Battle.net system would be able to handle it with more success. Here are some quotes from the original developer panel from Blizzcon in early 2021:

Blizzard wrote:

Moving onto modern Battle Net helps us with a lot of those types of things. To say it's lock-tight I wouldn't dare do that - that's like throwing a gauntlet down to the community. But all of that should be far more secure now.

Rob Gallerani - Lead Designer 44:00 19th Feb 2021

Blizzard wrote:

Yeah we have a server team working on it, and these are some of their efforts. We want to stop the bots, stop duping, as much as possible. There's a lot of stuff happening in the back end of things.

Andre Abrahamian - Lead Designer 44:32 19th Feb 2021

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

As for the Blizzard devs and them taking a stance on any of their issues, lol, twitter might be a better place to reach them out than their own forum (as we have seen in the past).

Not to de-rail the topic here but this is the biggest issue of them all - the team seem completely out of touch with their real community, and are happy instead to make the minimum effort possible by partnering (rarely at that) with only Twitch streamers and Cosplayers for promotional content for their social media.

I've been making Blizzard fan sites for years, and always had a direct line with the dev team - I'd receive giveaway keys for competitions, exclusive news snippets, and basically had a connection with them as a webmaster representing a community. This time around, with D2R specifically, they have not responded once to any of my numerous emails. They never reached out to say hi or even to touch base.

Not just emails like 'hey we are a d2 community, check it out' - but sending them well written bug report compilations about the state of the client chat functions for example (Schnorki I think you remember that). Not a single response back from them whatsoever. Those that I know inside the company have always told me they've passed on my messages to the team, so I know they're reading our representations there, just not contacting back.

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

My goal here is to bring more awareness, share my opinion, see what others think, and hopefully, just hopefully this can be a prelude to everyone becoming more vocal and Blizzard actually starting to pay some attention to us again.

The only way to get any contact with the official team in 2022 I've determined is by getting some chick to dress up as an Assassin for Diablo Immortal, and make a dancing video or something. That or have a stream account with 5 low-quality diablo 2 vods and then get given the 'reveal' for a new Runeword (true story). I've been regularly pinging PezRadar on Twitter, DMing him on Reddit, and as mentioned before emailing other people at Blizz to pass along the message. No responses.

Edit: Just on a final note, guys you can talk about other websites here freely by the way. There's no need to make allusions or vague references. Unlike other platforms, d2io doesn't censor your posts to remove URLs to 'competitors' or ask that people 'not talk about them'. Talk all you like, just don't link malware lol.

Teebling wrote: 2 years ago

Not just emails like 'hey we are a d2 community, check it out' - but sending them well written bug report compilations about the state of the client chat functions for example (Schnorki I think you remember that)

Remember?
Most of those bugs are still here... :/

I think people refrain from name dropping certain names of platforms just so they do not get any more recognition than they already have and not because they fear of being censored.

But yeah somehow it is the same old story. The initial panel came with great promises and with a hope to care for the community and then that happened... The dancing assassin cosplay, although a bit much is unfortunately accurate :c.

That was the reason why I said initially we need platforms such as this one and other community ran forums to be more active and show blizzard that this state that we've got right now is NOT ok. I have been playing and enjoying d2 for a long time now. I had only started to play with friends using LAN before D2R came out just because it was sooooo bad everywhere else. D2R came with the big promises and I have bothered to yet again reconnect with the community but if things stay the same I _might_ participate in season 2 of ladder but I will most likely **not** be returning for S3, regardless of what crazy new runewords they come up with. As one of the populars streamers put it "I got so excited when I found

Jah on day 3. I knew I was sitting on a fortune and decided to wait until the weekend to sell it"... Only to find 2 days later that the price of

Jah has shrunk by a factor of three rather than going up as expected.... This is toxic.

And yeah, plenty of bots exists, as Teeb said they are everywhere and are easy access. I do not suggest anyone uses these because 1. Are you really that person 2. That would make so many people hate you and 3. On the off-chance that the new B.net platform actually handles these and Blizzard take action (yeah and Santa exists) Do you really wanna risk your account being banned?

As for the duping, yep that is why I said alleged. There has been no mention of it anywhere but there is a very strong case for it, not just by people selling 16

Ber runes day 2 or buying 80 Reaper's Tolls and stuff like that but mainly the biggest thing that smells the fishiest to me is the newly created accounts selling the perfect base for Enigma + the runes for it _WITHOUT_ making the Enigma and selling it. It is not like the Enigma rolls and they want to sell it "unidentified" or "unmade" so they can try and squeeze more value out of it. No. It is because whenever runeword is created (even if it were with dupped runes) it gets a new unique item ID which makes it appear as a legit item. So making it go "poof" is harder. Why then do not the people make the enigmas themselves and sell that as it is "legit" new items? Simple, if they did that, they can be easily tracked and banned. The enigmas they made will likely go poof, but actually putting them into the economy makes it harder to be traced. Ah yes and base items do _not_ have an item ID assigned to them. That is why if you find the super rare 15 ED 3os armor (how often have you found those) you can sell (or duplicate) it safely. There was a guy that had sold I believe over 30 3os 15ED armors with the Enigma rune words not even a week into ladder.... Sure, bots are one thing but... these two things make me very very sus. Of course it is all allegations and I might be wrong. Happy to be, in fact, I hope I am yet... I do not believe that I am wrong. There was a good video made by coooley on the matter I encourage people to watch that too. He's been known to troll occasionally but one thing is certain he does care about the community and if he is trolling he usually makes that very obvious, this time, it was not the case.

Can confirm there is at least one duper going around in the community duping highly valuable bases (this is from watching market values across all trades sites and working with my closed friend group to identify where the lowest priced things were for sale). We found a huge drop in discrepenacy around 1 particular market on JSP that got flooded into oblivion.

With the change in 2.4, all bases when they get a socket added to them get a unique identifier that can be abused in some way. There's a ton of 4os E mancatchers with a

Ber already in them on sale. Same thing happened with a 3/3/2 fire druid pelt. All of a sudden someone had 40 of them.

Or maybe, in their own weird Blizzard way, they actually decided to listen to the community.

Blizzard: "we're making dclone more accessible! same spawn mechanic but different hunting!"

Randos: "the f***?! how is this still SoJs?!"

Blizzard: *Silence*

Randos: "seriously, wtf..it was only ever added for SoJs to drain the dupes. there ain't no dupes anymore! use something like

Standard of Heroes instead!"

Blizzard: "yeah, ok..good point. here, have a new duping method!"

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Blizzard: *Silence*

Randos: "seriously, wtf..it was only ever added for SoJs to drain the dupes. there ain't no dupes anymore! use something like

Standard of Heroes instead!"

Blizzard: "yeah, ok..good point. here, have a new duping method!"

More like:

Randos: "seriously, wtf... it was only ever added for SoJs to drain the dupes, there ain't no dupes anymore!"

Blizzard: *Silence*

Randos: "There aren't dupes anymore? Right, @Blizzard?"

Blizzard: *Silence*


On a serious note. Yeah, I think there is a strong case for dupes, even though nothing is proven or found (yet). I really hope that with a big and active community such as we have right now we'd be able to pinpoint the duping method and inform the revs demanding a patch.... As if they will ever do something about the game. Sadly, it is not just Diablo, it is many of Blizzard's "old" titles that do not have (blizzard owned) RMTs. They simply do not care, because they bring little to no revenue compared to "cosmetic changes and skins" RMTs. Anyway, getting off topic.

On the subject of dupping. Me and a friend found something interesting yesterday (some of you may already know that). **And a fair warning from here on everything I say till the end of this post is pure speculation. Still, if it throws someone into the right direction and people discover something useful that would be amazing!**

The story:

A friend and I were doing some 2 man

Baal runs yesterday (yes, we are weird). It got to the point where my character was maxed on gold the he could carry. I still clicked accidentally on a gold pile and got the usual "I cannot carry anymore". Although to my surprise the gold pile had shrunk by about 1/2.... Weird. Anyway, we kept doing that just because it was fun and kept repeating "small indie company" while doing it, when my friend actually realized that this (about half) of the gold pile that I clicked on every time had actually gone into his carried gold.

WOW. That is a revelation. Over 10 years playing this game and we just found about it (perhaps other people know of it already and is not as exciting). A few interesting things to note tho, not every time the gold pile was halved. Sometimes it stayed the same. Additionally, not every time it was decreasing by 1/2. It was decreasing by about 1/2 but not quite... Very peculiar thing this diablo 2 is, eh? Anyway, what got me thinking is that when I was maxed on gold that I carried and I still tried to pick a gold pile, (about) half of the gold went to my friend and (about) half of it went onto the Ground. In other words.... There was one gold pile (item), my friend got (some) of that gold (item) and yet another instance of that gold (item) was found onto the Ground. So, to put it even simpler, we had one thing, than did some action and ended up with two things :yikes:. Again, pure speculation, that gold thing we found after was "expected" behavior as any character that picks gold will end up with half of that and the other half goes to the other player (in a 2 player game). But if someone had found a way like this to perform similar actions not with gold but with real items... well you know where this is going.

Anyway, we had some fun, played with it for about 5-10 minutes and got bored. But... if anyone wants to repeat and follow-up on their findings please do so publicly in this forum, let's find that garbage if it exists, remove it from our game, and toss it right back at the duppers faces.

Story tldr;

In a (2) player game, after a player picks-up gold they will receive only 1/(2) of that amount and the other 1/(2) goes to their partied player(s).

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

[...]
Story tldr;

In a (2) player game, after a player picks-up gold they will receive only 1/(2) of that amount and the other 1/(2) goes to their partied player(s).

Nothing strange to me, if you or someone else want to know more about gold sharing, here is a link to diablowiki that explain the mechanic: Gold Sharing

Nah, that's perfectly normal behavior for gold. There's essentially two types of gold drops:

"Shared gold" and "exclusive gold". And yes, I did just make up those terms.

Shared gold is stuff that e.g. drops from kills while you're in a party. I.e. if a monster drops gold, it becomes shared gold to all involved with you. When that gold is picked up, it is distributed evenly across everyone in the party (hence the 1/2 in your 2 man group).

The exclusive gold is gold that is intended for individual pickup. If your friend gets himself wrecked for example and drops his on-Death gold, that pile of gold is not shared gold but is exclusive gold. Not exclusive in the sense that only he can pick it up again but in the sense that the person clicking it to pick it up gets all of it.

In either case, if you are full on gold, you can't pick up any more and whatever you cannot pick up is re-dropped.

As a result, when you click gold from monsters it gets cut into halves and sent to your buddy and you (or half re-dropped by you). But when click on exclusive piles, they'll stay the same.

You may be right, however the Asian community is massive. It looks like there is well over 500,000 players on ladder, it could be estimated that at least a third of that is located in Asia. With that many players that many dclone walks is entirely reasonable.

I don't really want to play the devil's advocate here, but could it be that they are parallel advertising Enigma as armor + runes, and also the runes separately? Because in this case you have a broader audience. I don't say it is not because of duping, but another legit explanation

The fire pelt is the first one that would truly catch my eye, even with farmers/botters pooling.

Getting the right stats on those is rare AF. Getting them on the same pelt with the same defense is next to impossible (I'd assume it really was the same @xsd?). So one person actually having 40 of them, if that's what happened, is indeed more than suspicious with any amount of bots in the background.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

The fire pelt is the first one that would truly catch my eye, even with farmers/botters pooling.

Getting the right stats on those is rare AF. Getting them on the same pelt with the same defense is next to impossible (I'd assume it really was the same @xsd?). So one person actually having 40 of them, if that's what happened, is indeed more than suspicious with any amount of bots in the background.

There has been a 3/3/2 with

Fissure

Volcano and grizzly that has slowly been draining into the market all from 1 source. All

Sun Spirit's iirc.

MattMakesPhotos wrote: 2 years ago

You may be right, however the Asian community is massive. It looks like there is well over 500,000 players on ladder, it could be estimated that at least a third of that is located in Asia. With that many players that many dclone walks is entirely reasonable.

It is possible, however, I am not quite convinced by your numbers. Let's try and do the math. **Even if** what you are saying is correct and 1/3 of the players are in Asia that is about 160 000 players. The 5 walks that I said is ~500 SoJs. That is one SoJ found by every 300 players or so. Let's assume that there are some that aren't quite in Hell yet ora re doing other stuff so 300 is ok number. Right now this is saying that **all** of these 300 players should be looking for an SoJ, which frankly I do not think is the case, but let's say half of them are actually looking. Ok, that leaves us with 150 players finding 2 SoJs each in the span of two days :grimace: I am not sure how many of you have tried to do SoJ hunting, but even if you are running nm

Andariel for HOURS there might be days that you do not find a single one :/ So... Either all of these 150 that were looking for SoJs got very lucky (possible). Or they collected them over a larger span (also possible, but unlikely given the timeliness of these events). Or it could be that some/most of these players did not get lucky (entirely possible) while other players (or bots) have gotten VERY lucky. Yeah that goes back to the botting issue but I suspect there's more to it.

That said, you could be right. It could all be legit. Having something be suspicious does not mean that it is fraudulent by default and we can't prove anything (yet). But saying "there are a lot of players, it could be possible that they have farmed them" seems like a very weak argument for why it is not fraud. It might be a correct argument but there are no details to back it up really.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

The fire pelt is the first one that would truly catch my eye, even with farmers/botters pooling.

Getting the right stats on those is rare AF. Getting them on the same pelt with the same defense is next to impossible (I'd assume it really was the same @xsd?). So one person actually having 40 of them, if that's what happened, is indeed more than suspicious with any amount of bots in the background.

From the few that shared their enigmas, the superior 3os 15 ED MP also seemed to have the same defense

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

The fire pelt is the first one that would truly catch my eye, even with farmers/botters pooling.

Getting the right stats on those is rare AF. Getting them on the same pelt with the same defense is next to impossible (I'd assume it really was the same @xsd?). So one person actually having 40 of them, if that's what happened, is indeed more than suspicious with any amount of bots in the background.

From the few that shared their enigmas, the superior 3os 15 ED MP also seemed to have the same defense

Well, they would have to. ED superiors always have max base + 1 def so there is no variation on that whatsoever.
The same would not be true for a non-sup druid pelt though.

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

MattMakesPhotos wrote: 2 years ago

You may be right, however the Asian community is massive. It looks like there is well over 500,000 players on ladder, it could be estimated that at least a third of that is located in Asia. With that many players that many dclone walks is entirely reasonable.

It is possible, however, I am not quite convinced by your numbers. Let's try and do the math. **Even if** what you are saying is correct and 1/3 of the players are in Asia that is about 160 000 players. The 5 walks that I said is ~500 SoJs. That is one SoJ found by every 300 players or so. Let's assume that there are some that aren't quite in Hell yet ora re doing other stuff so 300 is ok number. Right now this is saying that **all** of these 300 players should be looking for an SoJ, which frankly I do not think is the case, but let's say half of them are actually looking. Ok, that leaves us with 150 players finding 2 SoJs each in the span of two days :grimace: I am not sure how many of you have tried to do SoJ hunting, but even if you are running nm

Andariel for HOURS there might be days that you do not find a single one :/ So... Either all of these 150 that were looking for SoJs got very lucky (possible). Or they collected them over a larger span (also possible, but unlikely given the timeliness of these events). Or it could be that some/most of these players did not get lucky (entirely possible) while other players (or bots) have gotten VERY lucky. Yeah that goes back to the botting issue but I suspect there's more to it.

That said, you could be right. It could all be legit. Having something be suspicious does not mean that it is fraudulent by default and we can't prove anything (yet). But saying "there are a lot of players, it could be possible that they have farmed them" seems like a very weak argument for why it is not fraud. It might be a correct argument but there are no details to back it up really.

There's a couple too many assumptions there I dare say. The "2 days" being the biggest one. Prior to these runs, asia seems to have triggered very few walks. So you're not looking at 5 in 2 days but more like what? 7? since ladder start. That's a much bigger time window to find or trade for SoJs. And with trading being an option (even more so for the platform sponsors of these runs), you really don't have to actually find them all.

Adding to that, before the dclone changes, a single Anni was worth more than a copy of D2:R cost. That's...massive incentive for proper farmers to get hundreds, maybe thousands of clients each off the bat to maximize those profits. As a result, there's a very real possibility that today's botters aren't running like 4 or 5 clients but are using hundreds to thousands each. Pooling that to sponsor a run every day or every couple days seems far from unreasonable.

Naturally, that's all still speculation as well.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

y2kid wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

The fire pelt is the first one that would truly catch my eye, even with farmers/botters pooling.

Getting the right stats on those is rare AF. Getting them on the same pelt with the same defense is next to impossible (I'd assume it really was the same @xsd?). So one person actually having 40 of them, if that's what happened, is indeed more than suspicious with any amount of bots in the background.

From the few that shared their enigmas, the superior 3os 15 ED MP also seemed to have the same defense

Well, they would have to. ED superiors always have max base + 1 def so there is no variation on that whatsoever.
The same would not be true for a non-sup druid pelt though.

Ah fair, that did not occur to me. Still, quite hard to believe that these people managed to get 30 of them (15 ED ones), not even a week into ladder. From watching these 100, 200, 500 cow runs they also note the perfect bases and at best find one in 200 runs, often not even that. So... 6000 cow runs (assuming this is where they farmed bases if legit) by day 3. Yeah it _should_ be possible but even a well geared character I think takes about 4 minutes to do a full clear. That is 2000 runs per day or 8000 minutes of playtime which is 133.3 hours of play time in a single day . Yeah that sounds crazy but for someone who has 6 bots running it might be possible. However, the numbers I quoted were average values and assumed non-stop play with no loading times (which is not the case) and a perfectly geared character :grimace: a lot of assumptions which cannot be true for the first weeks of ladder. So either dupping, or whoever found them was running at least 4 times the amount of bots I just quoted (i.e., 20-25 bots). If you think about it and people are willing to go on such gruesome lengths with violation of the company's T&Cs it is _disgusting_ that these people have not been caught yet.

Sure, if one player was running one bot, w/e still a pretty sad thing to do but if they were running it for a few hours for themselves I can buy that this would be trickier to follow. But a single person multing and running over 20 concurrent bots all the fkin time, WOW.

The worst part is, Blizzard does have some (very selfish) incentive to ban these and they are not doing that either. If they ban the 30 bot accounts that are farming, these botters will buy 30 more new keys to run their bots again and so on. I guess the stance (if it is for maximizing profits) by Blizzard would be "for how long can you let the botters run, such that you make them willing to invest in new game copies, while not completely pissing off the community". Not saying that this *is* what they are thinking. I am just speculating. for all we know right now they might not even be aware that bots exist. They are *that much* detached from the community.