Jared Stones

Beardozer wrote: 4 years ago

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.