Question
When items are spawned do they have a hidden unique serial identifier? What is stopping blizz from tracking these items for duplicates? If a duplicate serial pops up they just delete the item sort of thing…
Maybe, we will see…
As most games with items you can collect they have a identifier like how runescape (Old school not sure of RS3) use’s Number from 0 - like 30000 or something like that, and with it being an online game Talking back to D2 If you use static numbers as these Identifiers, it would be fairly hard to tell which items are legit and which are duped
Example(s) Numbers are just for an example
SoJ - 4
Soj - 4
It would be pretty hard to tell if that was a duped item in my mind. Even if they did something like
Soj - hdy783#
Soj - hdy783#
Comes back to the same issue, plus with the game being online and single player, and logging each item a character has they would probably need the biggest HDD/SSD just to store all the logs of all the items all characters have and pray and hope it never fails, also at the same time, having a team just go through logs each and every single day just looking for duped items, would probably drive them insane.
I would personally suggest something like Fail check by checking original item, with item acquired from trade, making sure it goes from one account to another, also dropped by player picked up by another player, along with a check to make sure a monster dropped the item and not changed by an item (Using D1 dupe method for that example), then the final fail check could be something more or less like Checking alive time on said item so for example
Soj - Not traded, and not dropped off monster, changed from Scroll of TP to Soj, then delete.
Soj - Not traded, and not dropped off monster, not changed from item, check player left game with item held, came back and dropped.
You get the idea, there are a lot of checks that would have to go on and on.
I am hoping Duping gets fixed with how advanced Blizzard has gone with their games, and can notice how it began and where to fix the issues. I would like a stable eco system for at least the first couple of years of D2R.
Thanks for the detailed response
This was a thing in D2. Every item has a unique ID. If 2 items with the same ID’s exist, the one saved to the server most recent will be kept and the other one will poof.
I believed they worked around it by upgrading runes and therefore getting a new unique ID. Don’t really know how it works with regular items. I knew there was a way with open a trade window and then close it and quit the game to save the item but this was only the make sure it would not poof. It didn’t perm the item if other item with the same ID’s was still around.
Anyways, checking the server for duplicate ID’s was already a thing in D2 so I do believe it will also be a thing in D2R. The problem is giving a new ID to a duped item and how Blizzard will counter it.
I don’t see a problem not knowing which is the original item and which is the duped item when they have the same ID number. They should delete both of them anyways. Maybe they would think twice before duping rare items.
single player duping wont be fixed, you can always manipulate everything.
in battlenet it should just be handled the same as in D3. just every interaction goes over the server and not over the client, like swithing items from stash to inventory etc.
Items have also been duped by accident or by server side issues and rollbacks. It is not fair to punish a player by deleting both items for something that’s not his fault.
The other thing is how often would you want these wipes to occur?
Exploiters will figure out the timing and try to trade their items ASAP. Basically trade you a dupe for a legit item.
It’s quite simple:
Every time an item gets used for crafting (cube/socketing), leaves the game or someone tries to trade it, it is getting checked for duplicates.
That shouldn’t really leave any room for abuse even if someone manages to find a way to dupe items.