I respect you opinion Orphan, however, you continue to accuse Parsnips of making too bold of statements that she supposedly is not qualified to make. Do you feel that you are qualified to make the above statement?
Hey Gambit,
Nope, I don't know the exact process required for a ladder reset, or to even how Blizzard detect hackers/botters on battle.net. But then again, I do not claim to be.
But here's some things to think about. We're talking about 4 realms here, whos server clusters lie in 4 different locations around the world (east and west coast of the US, Sweden, Korean). Each server cluster contains x amount of servers (not sure exactly, probably around 30 servers each, possibly more.) Taking into account the fact that there's no limit to the amount of accounts any single user can have (and the fact that alot of people have mentioned that they have 10+ mule accounts) we're looking at
alot of characters that would need to be converted to non-ladder. Taking into account the fact that with the last reset some people were able to sneak non-ladder chars back onto ladder for a short time.
Finally, you need to take into account the fact that there must be a database that keeps track of all the char names on a single realm. Why? Because a) whenever you create a new char it needs to check it against something, and it's not checking each .d2s file. Why? because b) I have two accounts with the same charname on each (both chars have expired).
Now, while I do not know for certain what the actual reset process entails, I do however work with large database structures on a daily basis for my work, and I can tell you that this type of thing would most definately take time. We don't even know what else Blizzard does in conjunction with the above things I've listed. We do know that they run a Ruststorm though. Now, let's not begin to get into what that would entail (checking every d2s file for duplicated footprints? How many chars are we looking at again? How many item per char? How many footprints does this equal?)
Parsnips, on the other hand, has already made statements on the simplicity of these tasks. I'm only asking for her to elaborate. This is not unlike something I would do to someone on the stats forum if they posted about a topic that was not common knowledge.
I do believe that if it was as simple as Parsnips seems to indicate it to be then Blizzard would have done them already. Blizzard's a smart company, who has consistantly remained one of the top game developers in todays world. It's unlikely that if the tasks were as easy as indicated, they would continually put them off for years on end.
Also, not everybody feels that she sounds like a "politician" or that her responses are "judgemental". After reading your posts you actually come across a little judgemantal yourself. Again, you make some very valid points.
I apologize if I'm come across judgemental. The reason I said that she sounds like a politition is because her responses sound epic and do not actually say anything. Take this one statement:
Parsnips said:
Unko Talok I am very sorry to hear this, I hope that my future actions can help to persuade you back to the love for this game the way it should be.
It's a common political tactic, you begin by making an apology, and then end with re-inforcing your agenda. I don't know, maybe it's just me, and maybe I hear too much politics, but alot of what's been said sounds too familiar.
Edit: The server count per realm would actually be about 80, not 30. Anyone who wants proof of this can simply search for a dclone server list which keeps track of the last walks for each server IP address.
Edit2: And what about the desired dupe detection? To be 100% effective you would need to check every footprint against every other footprint regardless of game location. Although my knowledge of duping is limited, I can say that alot of the older ones were executed without the char being in the same game. So how many games must the automatic dupe detector go through to check for duplicate fingerprints? How will this affect the speed of the games? How about inactive chars who are just sitting on mule accounts? It'll need to check those as well. Active ruststorm takes a long time to run as it is, and for good reason.
Edit3: For some reason, I got footprint on my mind. That should be fingerprint, bah.
