07-18-2006, 01:21 AM
Quote:It may be more or less than 256, but I am willing to guess that is a lot more, which means that I agree with you that it is extremely suspicious if two characters have an item with the same unique code.
At the absolute rarest possibility (for sure there are other ways that the game can generate duplicate items, but in this case it is guaranteed), two people would have to create games with the same seed. To the best of my memory, Diablo seeds using the system time in seconds only (as opposed to milliseconds). Hopefully my memory is right, or this argument is going to be very flawed. There are 3600 seconds in each hour. Now there used to be easily 50,000 people playing Diablo at a time during peak hours, not counting anyone playing outside of b.net. You would almost have to expect that if one person found an obs/zod, there could be not only 1 other but possibly a whole bunch of others who started a game at the same time. Even to have hundreds of people start a game at the same second and kill at least Laz's gang does not seem too outrageous at that point in time. Today with only maybe 500 playing at a time (across the 4 gateways and solo), it is still to be expected that at some given time, a handful of people will start a game at the same second. It's not the safe bet that it once was, but it still has to be a very common occurrence. While most items have a tendency to disappear pretty quickly, I imagine the retention rate of obs/zods and other uber items is a different story, so even the thought that hundreds of obs/zods found in the same timestamp 5 years ago could still be floating around b.net is not too absurd.
The bottom line is, it is impossible for a common dupes list to have any kind of reliability. There is just flat out no way that on public b.net you can discern the difference between the possibility of ~100 identical legit obs/zods, and the possibility that I find one nobody else has ever found, dupe it, and trade or use it on 2 or 3 separate characters. Almost nobody seems to really grock this, and that is a large reason why scanners are capable of doing more harm than good in the general case.