Uber upgrade?

[gekko]

If the reason you oppose item purchase is that any such purchase might not be legit, then in fairness, you must similarly oppose item trading.  With so many known hacks, one can not be even reasonably sure of items one did not personally locate.

Funny, I just use common sense when trading.

See, it's very simple to figure out which items are likely hacks/dupes, and which items are not. BotD weapons and most "elite" runewords, for example, are almost all the result of duping or botting. So I will not trade for them. On the other hand, the 20 perfect gems I just traded for were not likely found by a bot, nor were they likely hacked/duped into existance. So I have no qualms trading for those.

Now, is it possible those gems were duped? Absolutely -- I didn't find them, so I can't prove to myself or anyone else they are 100% "legit." However, that's where the common sense has to kick in.

If the reason you oppose item purchase is that any such purchase might not be legit, then in fairness, you must similarly oppose item trading.

Wrong. Absolutely, positively, 100% wrong. This argument is one of the most frequently used by those claiming purchasing items is fine. However, it's also dead wrong. Why?

You're taking my stance on hacked items far past the logical extreme. My argument consists of two parts:
(1) Items purchased from websites such as d2items.com are virtually guaranteed to be the result of hacking, duping, or botting;
(2) Purchasing such items drives the market for hacked/duped/botted items and therefore contributes to constant stream of new hacks and the use of bots to obtain these items.

You've tried to turn my arguments into:
(1) Hacked/duped/botted items are wrong;
(2) It is morally unacceptable to use hacked/duped/botted items even if you have no idea they are H/D/B'd AND could not reasonably be expected to figure out whether or not they are legit.

The difference mostly lies in how these arguments tie into my point (2): purchasing these items drives the market and contributes to H/D/B'ing. The fact is that buying items from a website gives that website a clear and distinct profit, encouraging them to continue supplying these items. Trading for items that you know are hacks (such as the older white rings, hex charms, etc) is less direct but is still supporting the hackers. Trading for items you know are almost certainly duped/botted (such as high runes, BotD weapons, etc) is where common sense should start to kick in -- if the item is likely duped/botted, then you need to simply not trade for the item. If the item is probably not duped/botted, then clearly there's no harm done.

It's simpler if you consider this from the reverse viewpoint: Let's say you consdier it OK to buy "real" items (not hacks) from a website. I cannot take this past the logical extreme and say that since you buy ANY item online, you are supporting the websites that supply hacks, and therefore you support hacking. Such an argument on my part would be clearly ridiculous, however. The only difference here is where you choose to draw the line -- I say use common sense. Common sense tells us when items are likely to be "legit" or not; common sense also tells us that by supportting websites that sell hacked items, you are fueling the next batch of hacks (whether you support hacking or not is immaterial in this case).

gekko