Realm game keep-alive oddities

[Crystalion]

The countess chest uses the same TC and ilvl as the rest of the containers and gold piles on the level, so I would not expect a lot of difference.  In fact the other random chests might be a little better in that you can get your gf% and mf% on them when you open them.

Ah, very interesting, thanks.

The requirements to get the drop are that the character that made the game has not completed the countess quest.  They need not be in act 1 or even in the game at the time of the countess being killed to get the fountain.

I have verified this v1.10s LAN play (WinXP user switching). I also verified that there are quest state changes for carry-alongs that do indeed depend on whether they are in the act (at least effectively, and I don't mean the trivial examples of quest states requiring presence for non-carry-alongs). Some quest state transitions have rather odd logic, from the standpoint of the net resultant state you can get into if you work at it (an example follows later)

As for the rest of the disscussion, i am not sure what you are trying to get at.  It sounds like a minor rehash of the character save file information.  And how the game uses ...

Hmm. This was a minor post that, in summary, had three diseparate trivia discussed:

1. my surprise at learning a solo realm game doesn't need a 5 minute hold before switching (if you can do the create/switch within the first minute). This is a trivia worth mentioning since some people, such as myself before stumbling upon the AS info, would have wasted an extra 4 minutes setting up certain games

2. a trivia that the implementation behind this lets you do a very silly thing: create and play a single account in two games (one realm) psuedo-simulataneously, perpetually ping-ponging between them every few minutes (this is, of course, trivial if you make use of other accounts or residual games from other accounts)

3. That one silly use for #2 (one account, no five minute wait) when you're doing countess runs anyway is to start the game with a non-countess credit char, in order to get the death cload opens chest effect

In follow up posts it was questioned as to whether that could always work and I replied that I thought I had a condition set that always did, even in (the objection cited case of) nm. I erroniously thought this might be one of those rare cases where quest transition effects are altered by whether a party member is in-act.

None of these are particularly important. Since I'm fairly impatient I do like knowing #1 and thought I'd share it while tossing in #2 & #3 to add value to the minor post (and because they are amusing).

Your comment about character save file info (quest state) and link raise interesting points however (I had read that thread before, as I do occassionally Lurk the PK, but thanks for the reference). The quest state info in the .d2s would be nice to have a reader for (simple GUI) rather than relying on the simplified junk in-game. However even so paying too much attention to it greatly suffers from a problem I prefer to illustrate by example...

Librarian wrote (in another thread in reply to my question):

>> 2. ?are IGs recreated at caster clvl for new games, or forever stuck at their original mlvl assigned when summoned long ago?

Since blizz fixed the IG-Bug so your tin soldier meets you in every game till he dies it is the same mechanics as in 1.09
That means he will be recreated every time you join a game, and the skillboni of the gear you wear while joining will define his quality.

Librarian tends to give quality info, so I'm inclined to accept this (testing would be better, but I don't have limitless time or patience). However, vis a vis the current discussion, imagine that I'd relied on explorations of the .d2s to help settle the issue... if I think I see or don't see the presence of a mlvl saved there for the Iron Golem I may be inclined to conclude that correspondingly the mlvl is or isn't used in recreation. This would, however, be quite a leap, as the code is free to do whatever it does, without being constrained by mere sensibility.

So, similarly, for the quest states being saved/exposed for our examination/restored. My recent quest tests suggest that the effective complexity of the interactions between game and player quest state is beyond the intuition of mere mortals like myself. Indeed I have been able to produce a fair number of truly odd states legitimately in-game that I'm sure Blizzard didn't intend or anticpate (none of them are worth reporting as "bugs" as opposed to oddities, imho). I will give one example because I find the oddity amusing...

In the Great Race thread, iirc, I recently stated I didn't know of a weakness in the first new Act 2 interlock (although I've reported on the weakness in the second in several places). As a side benefit to today's testing to prove to my own satisfaction that I wasn't imagining some dependancies on act presence for some quest transitions I indeed found a minor weakness. Here is what you can do (bear in mind this trivia isn't useful, since as long as carry-along is allowed that dwarfs pretty much any other technique you might consider)...

I now have a character, WalkOnBye (v1.10s LAN play), who was rushed for Andy, and partied with another character when that character *initiated* a particular quest, but otherwise did not party, and did not perform any quests in act 2 other than to complete act 2. Yes, he completed act 2 without killing anything (since, strangely enough, some prior character seems to have gone through and slaughtered all the monsters), without questing to release either the lift-darkness or summoner interlocks, and, of course, without being portaled into any area from the palace through Duriel's chamber. He knows no waypoints.

How? When I had another character approach Drognan after finishing life-darkness, I briefly partied with WalkOnBye (who was still stuck in act 1 at the time) for a second. This started the "explore the palace" quest in WalkOnBye's second quest tab (which he could not, at that time, see). Subsequently he was rushed past Andy (and could then see just that quest active in his act 2 tab). He then joined a game created by a Duriel staff-placed drone in which I'd already cleared monsters, including Duriel.

He proceeded to walk into the Palace, down to the Arcane Sanctuary via the basement portal, through the red summoner area portal into the true tomb down the hole through the doorway to Tyriel, to town from that portal to talk to Jheryn and Meshif (and thus on to act 3). On the entire walk, had he ever cast a TP and left, he would not have been able to return through it ("impossible"). Had he bothered to grab any of the three waypoints he passed, he would have been able to use them back and forth.

Very amusing. YMMV.

So the short answer to "what you are trying to get at"? would be: just noticing minor quirks along the way, as I test other things.

The fun screenshot Bolty has up is just one such, where the "hidden" quirk that isn't usually important and therefore isn't well known is that teleport can adjust your location when the destination is itself not proper, but the teleport is allowed--this is the same effect you know and love with door hydras, thus the picture contains the hint for how to do the teleport. FYI, in case you didn't know, teleport is apparently restricted on Duriel's chamber level to be line-of-sight, so you can't just trivially teleport past the door, and, indeed, even if the door is open teleporting in that chamber doesn't work the way you're used to--must be all that Horadric magic infused into the floating stones nearby (perhaps modders have a different explanation :P ).