Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Occhidiangela]

What exist is a client component of the game . . . Then there is a server part, which runs the actual game.   Now, when you play on realms, the realms obviously runs the server, and you run a client on your computer (each player do).

Of course, nothing would prevent Blizzard from actually DO having different server programs, but that makes little sense, why in effect programming and maintaining several different “games” when they could all be the same or at least extremely similar. 

Jarulf, while I completely agree with you that Blizzard would have to do more work to write and run a modified version of the server code that we have on our PC's on all Realms Servers (they would all have to run the same "mod" so to speak) Blizzard could for their own reasons add a level of difficulty to their configuration control of Diablo II-Server if they chose to. It would boil down to being a sort of Mod, put on all of their Realms Servers.

I have played a few mods on private realms, and as a player, you just play it and some of the things are different.

Without adding the subroutines and code changes that some people think are causing a "decaying MF value," Blizzard could assign different values to any part of the game code(at the risk of goofing things up) change flags, change numerical values, or do any number of other things to make the Realm Game slightly different, and the Realms players might never notice it. For example, the Realm version could have a MF = MF/3 operation inside how it decides the final MF value added and we would never know it since it would not be readable on our Diablo II "server part" that we can read from our copy.

Blizzard would in that case be running a Mod on all of the Realms Servers (that means that they would have to load all of their servers with a slightly different "patch" of the 1.10 that we can call 1.10R) and it would probably be transparent to us. Players would not be able to tell the difference unless a striking difference (such as all Flayers are all of a sudden Physical Resistant at 100%) was noticed and someone checked playing it in Single Player and found a different value at the same difficulty.

Unless someone reverse engineered the game code that is running on the servers, downloading all the files, and then matching them file by file against what was on one of the copies of the game from the CD + the download of the 1.10 patch from the Blizzard FTP, we could not confirm a difference.

They already duplicate some code between the client and server component, and that has in the past (and probably still) lead to several bugs where the code have not been similar enough and the information displayed on the client have not matched the actual server data. On top of that, it would be VERY confusing for players, playing a game that would differ depending on what type of game you player, even more so if the differences are small, subtle and unknown. That would be horrible.

Horrible? If all Realm Servers were running the same Patch, the 1.10R I suggest up there, then all Realm players would be playing the same game, but a slightly different one from Open or Single Player 1.10. Since you point out that they often patch the servers without sending the players a patch, it is at least possible that in the process of that patch, a subtle change to the server part of the game can be changed to "1.10R." As a Realms player, you could be playing the 1.10R Mod right now and not know it.

Why they would want to do that with all of the bugs they have not yet fixed would be beyond me, and I agree with you that it makes little sense.

So no, there are no such run “counters”, nor any special MF dimishing effects in the game, not in single player, not on realms.

I wish I could agree that your point is irrefutable: your assertion can be proven for the game we all have on our PC's. You and others have looked at it. But your observation regarding "not on realms" cannot be proven (unless one of your friends at Blizzard has confirmed that to you) even though I think you are right. ;)