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.

• FullintriffYear ago

  This is not account restoration??