Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Jarulf]

What about ladder-only items?  There has to be some kind of check what kind of game is being played in the item drop code.

Ehh, I was not aware of specific item types only existing in ladder play. Or do you refer to cube recipies? There are some supposedly on ladder only. That is nothing strange since the game supports and uses two different cube data files, one for realms and one for non realms. The full code supporting both exists in the common d2common.dll file. The onlyy difference is that Blizzard doesn't ship that data file with the downloadable patch. However, all code and data for it is in there for full view and tha is the only data file were that is the case. SUpporting, by the way, that there is not a different set of data files for realms as in the case they DO have it (for cube), they handle it by different data files, both fully supported in the code, not just swapping files with identical names and such, creating possible messes, confusion and errors.

EDIT: Ohh, I noted the unique items in ladder only. Have not checked the unique picking code in 1.10 though. However, the uniqueitems.txt data file that list unique items, has a column specifying if the unique is a ladder only item and when picking uniques, it would compare that entry of the data file with the flag indicating if the current game is a ladder one or not. Nothing strange here, no special files for ladder only. Remember that as a server, the game runs ALL types of games at the same time. A server can run both hard code and non hard core games. It can run ladder and non ladder games and so on.