Pet Duping

[Solana]

I would love it if someone could confirm for me whether or not duped pets can be sold on the auction house. I opened up a ticket a couple of days ago on my home server because there was a level 1 character selling 3 separate Ethereal-Soul Traders for 26,000 gold bid and 27,000 gold buyout. (I paid $120,000+ gold for my Soul Trader and I really don't appreciate what these people are doing to the pet trading market ...) A GM finally responds to me this morning with this:

Hey there!

I am Game Master Skellenthine, at your service!

I understand that you are wondering about some pets being possibly duped.

I wanted to share some information with you that could clear some things up. If items are able to be put on the AH then they are not duped If a duped item is posted to the AH the AH denies it and says that the item is used already.

A lot of people will make level 1's on other servers and cage pets like this to sell across server which is why you may see level 1's with crazy cool pets to sell.

So this guy is probably legit! We thank you for the report, we will keep an eye on it

Have a lovely day my friend!

I kind of figured I was wasting my time opening up a ticket for this issue but I just find it so frustrating. I've seen more level 6 Spectral Tiger Cubs than I can count in the past few months as well. I guess (according to Blizzard) that it's just coincidence multiple people took the time to level each pet to 6 and then post them in the auction house? Anyway, some confirmation that duped pets can indeed be listed in the auction house would make me feel less crazy.

[Poofah]

That is Bliz' boilerplate response: allow me to translate:

'Maybe it's duped, maybe not. We don't know and frankly we don't really care. But if you buy it from AH then we will leave you alone, so don't worry about it either way.'

[Solana]

I can read between the lines, however, I cannot understand why they are allowing this to continue especially when specific players are being reported. I've seen people receive bans for lesser offenses. It just seems as though it would be in their best interest to enforce their own terms of service.

[Sibi]

Our very own Faelar has already undertaken this misadventure with Blizzard.
You can read about it here: http://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=10711&hilit=faelar

As long as people keep paying their subs, Blizz will keep not caring. Although, "dupers" are clearly a crafty lot, they're likely just to find new ways even if Blizzard bothered to shut them down. And more often than not the player isn't actually some chinese gold farmer. He's a level 1 alt of someone you actually play with from day to day as I came to find out on my own server and on Illidan.

[Faelar]

The gist of what we have learned is this:
*Duping as we coin it does not exist in Blizzard's eyes. Meaning they don't believe the pets can just be created through some method that just creates endless pets from nothing. Blizzard has a VERY narrow definition for the word and does not view it the same as we do.
*However Blizz has acknowledged there is an exploit (they won't tell us how or what) being used to create these pets. That is what we'd call duping but Blizz does not use the term.
*In some blue posts responses I got they told me that the TCG pets we see spammed on the AH are 'legit' in that the ID codes given to each seperate item in the game meaning the 15 ESTs on one server are 'different' in that they aren't all sharing the same code which would be a red flag in their eyes. Does not mean they are 'legit' pets as we view them but it just means they are 'dupes'...just 'exploited'.

Yes that is all very confusing and Blizz does not make it easy for us to get a confirm on what we know to be true just by watching it. The proper term for this is still duping despite what Blizz says. They are using some method to bring more pets into the game then is normal, be it by hacked TCG codes, Stolen CC's, hacking accounts (not as likely), or whatever method we can think of.

[Faelar]

Also in regards to the OP about duped pets being able to be sold on the AH, I wondered about that early on as well. I remember well the Jewelled Onyx Panther flood where they were 25-30k for an item that cost a MINIMUM of 72k to craft. Blizz claimed compromised accounts in this case but the thing that was most odd was that people that bought these things would comment that they were unable to list these things on the Auction House.

I wondered if pets were different as they became learned and then caged and I thought it might bypass whatever system was stopping the Onyx Panthers from being listed. Really it is just theory and guessing on my end at this point, but I am still curious how these pets come into existance and why they are different from things in the past they used to dupe and sell.

[Siegurd333]

Recently a wave of spectral cubs and other rare tcg pets landed on my server. The seller ended up being a level 40 dude. I asked him how he obtained them and he actually responded. He said he had them laying around and was selling them off. I tried to armory him, but it won't display: [url]http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/korialstrasz/Gompers/[/url]

I'm not terribly inclined to believe him, but it's odd for someone to want to unload their pets for gold on a low-medium-ish pop server when they could sell them for much higher elsewhere. Honestly I can't imagine why anyone would want korialstrasz gold.

[Faelar]

Yup they will just go lower and lower in price until they are worth as much as the small tcgs. That is one thing you can count on with the dupers/gold sellers. They are very greedy and will flood something down to nothing.

[Poofah]

Yup they will just go lower and lower in price until they are worth as much as the small tcgs.

Another fun fact: EST/cub are now more common than the small tcg pets (Puffer, Grell). As of late July anyway, which is the last time I could check (RIP UJ).

I can read between the lines, however, I cannot understand why they are allowing this to continue especially when specific players are being reported. I've seen people receive bans for lesser offenses. It just seems as though it would be in their best interest to enforce their own terms of service.

My best guess is this:

When they made pets cageable, they didn't think ahead enough. There's no indication that there's any unique identifier associated with caged pets. I honestly doubt that Bliz can tell the difference between a dupe and a legit pet any better than we can. Without being able to tell for certain, I think their policy is not to ban sellers unless there is an overwhelming likelihood that they're nefarious (e.g. lvl 1, no achieves, dozens of TCG pets and no other valuable items, foreign IP, trial account, whatever). Otherwise they run the risk of banning legit accounts who purchased duped pets in good faith, and that's not worth the PR fallout.

It's noteworthy that the TCG mounts (Reins of the spectral tiger/swift spectral tiger) are still 500k+ and have very low population numbers (~30 or less across US AHs, generally). There is clearly some security built in to these items that prevents duping or makes the items unsellable or immediately detectable, and this security is clearly not built in to caged pets.

TCG pets were sold by a 3rd party company in the first place, which has since cut ties with Blizz, and anyway they have already been sold. Bliz has no financial interest in stopping the duping -- only a PR interest, in terms of maintaining confidence of the playerbase. Looking at the WoW forums, I very rarely see complaints from people whose TCG pets collapsed in value. But if they started banning people for reselling duped pets, or confiscated dupes from legit accounts, can you imagine the fallout? Realistically, what are the chances that a cub or EST bought in the past year is legit? I would get a ban for sure, and I bet many other users here would too.

So basically, I think they've chosen the lesser of two evils. I think they should have worked harder on the implementation when they decided to make pets cageable, but the ship has sailed, and the consequences are pretty much inevitable.

[Faelar]

I mean I am resolved to the fact that there is little that can be done about all of the pets that have flooded the market in the past year. However, I do wish the hole was plugged so whatever is in the market would be all that we'd have to deal with and not seeing more and more dupe waves hitting every few weeks or so.

I mean I can come up with all sorts of guesses as to what I think is going on and I feel it has something to do with the TCG code generation system, the only reason I thought back on it again was when League of Legends disabled all of the skin codes for their game because there were people selling TONS of older skins for the game which was just impossible to have that many in the market based on how many were originally created. People basically have admitted that the skin code number generator was figured out and if you had a code for 1 of these things you could get far more than 1 from it by just changing a few numbers/letters if you knew what to change. So is it possible that the same thing happened to TCG codes? Maybe. It is fun to debate at least.

The real X factor in this is the Viscous Horror, with it not being a TCG pet yet showing up in huge numbers I am throw for a bit of a loop. Maybe it is something gold sellers scooped up even at higher prices to turn around and sell with the other pets to spread out gold as much as possible and move it around. Who knows. Just grasping at straws.

The thing that bugs me now is why has this not spread to other pets that are not TCGs? Why not Darkmoon Rabbits? Is it only TCG's they can hit and VH was a red herring? I just want the holes plugged and I don't care much anymore about having pets removed that got flooded into the game. Blizz messed up and has dodged the issue too much, it sucks.

[Faelar]

Also I just remember things like Jewelled Onyx Panther's, Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger, and the other items over the past year or two that were being flooded before TCGs started up. I really wonder what is going on.

And Poofah you might be right on them not thinking ahead far enough when it came to caging pets. It is possible that learning a pet and then caging it frees it from issues that the Jewelled Onyx Panthers had which could not be listed on the AH.

[Solana]

So, I did a little bit of digging around this morning and found a quite interesting comment at the bottom of this video:

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyiWFXsQT0M[/url]

TL;DR No one is duping in the traditional sense. People are abusing the account restoration service. Lets try to make blizzard aware of this so innocent players can stop suffering the consequences.

Current State of "Duping"
Hello, let me start by saying that currently duping does not exist in Diablo III. Not in the sense that you are use to. Lets start by getting a clear definition of duping.

Defining Duping
Typically when people say duping; they relate it to the massive duplication of items through rapid methods involving in game exploits. This was a common "issue" in D2 for a very long time. To give a example of a few dupe methods here is some discovered by me and my friends as well as ones collaborated together via "secret" online communities or IRC 10 something years ago using d2packet sniffer. Disclaimer: I am recalling these by memory, steps may not be perfect; but they are to give a idea of how real duping worked.

D2 WayPoint Dupe
This was probably the fastest dupe I have ever seen, you could dupe a inventory full of different random items in about 15 seconds.

1) Player 2 sniffs packets for closing trade window.
2) Player 2 opens trade with player 1 near a waypoint.
3) Player 2 sends packet to close trade window, but it leaves it open for his trade partner.
4) Player 2 is now free to walk to waypoint, change acts and drop all his items on the ground
5) Player 1 now closes his trade window, this returns all items to player 2, but leaves the items on the ground

D2 Charsi Imbue Quest Dupe
This was a much slower dupe method, but even while being slower you could still dupe a single item quickly hundreds of times.

1) Player acquires the (reusable) sequence for the part of the imbue quest that drops the item.
2) Player finds the id of the item he wishes to dupe by simply dropping it on the ground and sniffing the event.
3) Player sends the known sequence to charsi substituting the id with the id of the item to dupe.
4) Player can send this over and over rapidly cloning the single item

Need for speed
Notice what these methods both shared? Extreme speed. The Diablo III auction house has no indication someone has found a exploit in the game allowing this kind of speed. Even a hard-to-pull off rollback method of crashing the game would create a much higher throughput of items.

You are so dumb! THEY ARE DUPING! I see more then one item on AH!!!!
They are indeed creating multiple copies of the same item. However they are not doing it at a high throughput via methods of exploiting the game. Software engineering has came a long way since D2, RDBMS give a great deal of protection against those kinds of exploits. They are not duping in the tradditional definiton, they are creating clones.

How are they copying items
With the help of the account restoration service. I recently joined a Ventrilo channel with some players bragging about how many "reps" they have had of restorations. What they do is purchase a new account and access it from a VPN. They transfer the items they wish to dupe onto their new account. They level their character for around 12-16 hours over the course of a couple days to give it playtime and saves. They make sure to stay logged into vpn the entire time to keep the same IP for all account access. On the third day they simply logout of the VPN and relogin, getting a new IP. They then join a public game and invite an a friend. They transfer the items to the friend. Now they sell all their gear they acquired while leveling, logout, delete the character. Later on in the evening they initiate a account restoration process. Sadly, blizzard blindly restores the account without doing any kind of due diligence or checking account activity.

Who cares if they are duping, mind your own business, maybe I can get a chance at godly items finally
Because the only people winning are the cheaters, I promise. What happens is you work for weeks, maybe months to acquire what you think is a end game item. Only to find out after purchasing it; it's in a dupe batch as more copies are slowly released into the economy. That 2b you paid for your item drops to 1b, to 700m. You lose, they win. Not so awesome in my opinion.

How can we stop this?
Demand that blizzard stops blindly restoring accounts; and punish those who have been involved in this practice. Re-posting this thread across various forums would help, I have tried posting this multiple times it is simply deleted without any reasoning, account notice emails, etc. This time I tried to remove as much details as I can and keep it very generic. I am also changing the tone of it. I'm not pissed at blizzard, they likely aren't even aware.. this is the best way to make them aware.

A PLEA TO BLUES
Please do not delete this post without notifying me why. I don't see any rules broken here. If you do feel compelled to delete this post, can you please pass the information on to the management of the account restoration team? I would appreciate it very much, as well as many other players still playing and standing behind your game. Thanks.

[Faelar]

I mean it could be a thing for WoW but if that was the method or something similar we'd have seen craploads of things like spectral tiger mounts, darkmoon rabbits and basically any item/mount/pet worth over 20k gold at varying waves. I'm just mainly curious why it is still focused on TCGs and the VH.

[Poofah]

Very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyiWFXsQT0M

TL;DR No one is duping in the traditional sense... They are not duping in the traditional definiton, they are creating clones.

I thought this part was funny. Dupe and clone are synonyms! But it's completely consistent with the blue responses I've seen. Apparently 'duping' is an ultra-specific definition that doesn't include items generated by slow or non-infinitely-repeatable exploits. Maybe we should use the term 'clone' since that seems to be closer to the industry standard definition for what we're seeing. Again it's totally consistent with the pet issues we've seen -- the pet clones always come in waves, which suggests that they can't be created out of thin air, rather the exploiters probably have to build up a stock over time and then sell it off all at once.

[Faelar]

I mean we can use whatever name we want for it. I think duping is just easier for most of us to use because I don't care what blizz says, that is what it is by most players definitions for the term. Blizz can be difficult and call it whatever they want heh.

[Poofah]

I feel the same, but it's possible that 'dupe' has a particular meaning in their minds that they'd like to avoid. They seem fairly adamant about it in any case. I don't mind calling it some other cuddlier term if it helps facilitate communication with blues.

Here's another thread I dug up, with a GM discussion SS:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1154010-Item-dupe-is-real-live-and-unstoppable-GM-confirmed

http://i.imgur.com/QkFuR.png

[Navi]

I'm glad you guys feel the same way. I get really annoyed when they act like it isn't happening or they don't know what we are talking about because we "didn't say the magic word."

IDGAF what they want to call it as long as they acknowledge and address it to the best of their ability.

[Faelar]

Oh blizz is very much into the magic words as far as things go. Like there are blue posts flat out saying that there is no such thing as ninja looting. period. Yet all of us know if we're in a group and it suddenly goes to master looting and all the items go to the same person that it is ninja looting. But Blizzard does not call that ninja looting.

But yes I think the magic word is exploit and 'exploitative means' when reporting these level 1's that flood servers with these TCG pets.