Re: [L] Jeremy's BIG ISO, look and see what I need!
{...}I should be able to replace them
{...}
how I handle it. First I keep all runes on a separate account and on a character I only ever enter my own private games with (no public games EVER). I always keeps HR's in my inventory and not in my stash. I always enter the trade screen immediately before exiting (either player to player or charsi) even when muling to other people's characters and as other people's mules. {...}
Thanks for the info! If you can put up with my long-windedness I'll offer a few thoughts on that further below.
As for your generous offer to replace, it really isn't needed. I knew (theoretically that) runes could poof and I still took days to use 'em up = it's my "fault". And the Infinity is just a for-fun equip for the forum playable mules project for an Enchantress who
isn't even started yet (her purpose is to be a twinkee helper, unpartied conviction/static field, after enchanting everyone).
Feel free to sell me a Zod for ~40 in my "marketplace" thread though, if you get one. :thumbsup:
...
I know, roughly, how duping is done (mis-design/bug exploit from a programmer's perspective) and I can make a very educated guess as to how the rust storm and anti-dupe code is done...
The problem is that hosting isn't actually free, it costs cycles (cpu, storage, comm bandwidth etc.). As such the serverside code has to try (at least a little--I'm certainly not saying Blizzard is brilliant here) to be efficient. This is still true, if not
more so, when they added on the anti-dupe code.
A "rust storm", then, would be a once-in-great-while massive scan through the gateway's (USWest vs. East etc.) database of stored characters, filtering (efficiency!) only for likely dupes and remembering the "watermark" for all of those, deleting any matches found subsequently (this allows for a "single pass" scan/delete, which isn't perfect but works pretty well for minimal cost).
However what is killing most dupes (e.g. runes) would be what got the two I had, the save-character MRU cache hit. This would be where a given "shard" of a gateway (you're familiar with this underlying infrastructure if you know anything about getting on a server with SoJs being mass sold) maintains a local cache of Most Recently Used watermarks for likely-to-be-duped items.
Every time a character is saved this cache would dump the oldest info it was keeping track of (=limited storage, limited time for processing!), then scan the character for
potentially duped items and add that data in. If, of course, any of those item watermarks are
already in the cache then the item is simply deleted (immediately before saving the character, and thus: *poof*).
A side benefit to doing things this way is that it helps shut down variants of the original (outmoded) dupe trick: trade item, leave game with item, crash game, hope "backup" copy of char in-game when crashed gets restored.
They cut way back on this one, of course, when they did better sync on char saves (this is the likely source of the short "temp ban"-like effect per char when you've been in a game that dies). But the MRU scanner helps catch the dupes that are achieved anyway.
I don't know if you were playing LoD in the early days before they put some of these band-aids in place but game crashes and server slow downs were increasingly commonplace.
In any case, re: "superstition", in light of your empirical good luck I would suggest just continuing doing things the way you have so far.
But perhaps HR accounts with 8 mules, each of which holds but a single HR might reduce "shrinkage"?
I would name each character after the ~name of the rune and also weapon switch to empty handed to visually show when no rune is on the mule (unless you prefer writing everything down on paper--but, if you're like me, then I can't find the paper! :crazyeyes
The reason this probably helps is that you would only access each mule twice per rune: once to put the rune on, and once to get it (and consume it! either by trading away or using up). By minimizing the number and span of saves/servers/scans you should be reducing the chance that a duped HR is poofed by a MRU hit.
If you love empiricism you could easily test how effective this additional precaution might be by the opposite test-to-destruction: take a single rune you believe is duped and start a new private game with that mule several times a day, recording how many saves it took to poof.
Naturally you then run the test again and again with other runes, just to gather enough data. :wink:
Haha, maybe this isn't so far fetched--maybe I could actually get someone who is rich but retiring from D2 to try it! :crazy:
p.s. I just can't resist adding that, properly speaking, Blizzard should have
randomly given one of the prior rune watermarks as the new watermark when "creating" a new rune (by cube-up) or runeword. This isn't perfect, but it does help and is efficient. If they were clever about (cheaply implementing) this then the last rune added to make a runeword had better not be a dupe!
