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

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

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

You get geared quite quickly when you bot multiple instances. That doesn't hold them up for long. Plus by your own numbers, you need not even 10 bots going which I dare say is a very low estimate these days. Hell, even back in the day private folks ran 4-8+ bots 24/7 with no problem. And I mean no problem..Blizz never really stepped in back then either.

The MP base really doesn't strike me as unreasonable based on botting alone or even significant numbers of manual farmers alone (though I'm much more inclined to believe in botting).

Just that druid pelt..if that actually happened..that's beyond what would be reasonable botter scope.

crispin wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

You get geared quite quickly when you bot multiple instances. That doesn't hold them up for long. Plus by your own numbers, you need not even 10 bots going which I dare say is a very low estimate these days. Hell, even back in the day private folks ran 4-8+ bots 24/7 with no problem. And I mean no problem..Blizz never really stepped in back then either.

The MP base really doesn't strike me as unreasonable based on botting alone or even significant numbers of manual farmers alone (though I'm much more inclined to believe in botting).

Just that druid pelt..if that actually happened..that's beyond what would be reasonable botter scope.

...and who knows for how long.

crispin wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

You get geared quite quickly when you bot multiple instances. That doesn't hold them up for long. Plus by your own numbers, you need not even 10 bots going which I dare say is a very low estimate these days. Hell, even back in the day private folks ran 4-8+ bots 24/7 with no problem. And I mean no problem..Blizz never really stepped in back then either.

The MP base really doesn't strike me as unreasonable based on botting alone or even significant numbers of manual farmers alone (though I'm much more inclined to believe in botting).

Just that druid pelt..if that actually happened..that's beyond what would be reasonable botter scope.

it's many reasons all together. a new dupe, many bots and at the moment blizzard is in shambles and who knows for how long.
I think this will go on for several months before blizzard does anything against the bots.

I've been checking out this bot thing. there are several chinese bots at the moment (I just didn't want to pay money for them) and they claim that they are not detectable, which made me think about how blizzard wants to find botters.
the botters claim that the bots imitate human like behaviours up to a point where they interact with npcs, identify items, sell junk, up gems in the cube and even take "pee breaks".
I am no coder and I have no idea how blizzard wants to find botters as the botters also claim that they don't need to hack into the game.exe anymore, instead they observe the machines Memory to make the bots work.
I think blizzard would have to "hack" your machine in a similar way to find running processes which don't belong there... although I hope they have measures on their servers to get rid of bots.