The SPF I know

@ioupainmax That's a good point, a true purist would have to discover everything on their own. Looking up guides which post all of the code and information could be considered cheating. Somewhat OT, but in regards to runewords this is in the expansion readme:

"Scrolls: In addition to Scrolls of Town Portal and Identify, you might now occasionally come across Scrolls of Knowledge. The sole function of these scrolls is to provide the player with information. Specifically, they are inscribed with "recipes" for the various Rune and Horadric Cube combinations."

Obviously they never implemented these, even in the lod beta.
 
@ThomasJohnsen I think your analogy with Railroad Tycoon is rather poor when it comes to D2 time traveling for example. It's not like those items just happen themselves. There are people on these forums who have spent massive amounts of time trying to get the very best earlier version items. Of course you are free to feel that these are still cheating, but I wanted to let you informed. Many will feel that those items were hard-earned however, you may underestimate the effort it can take :)
 
@ThomasJohnsen I think your analogy with Railroad Tycoon is rather poor when it comes to D2 time traveling for example. It's not like those items just happen themselves. There are people on these forums who have spent massive amounts of time trying to get the very best earlier version items. Of course you are free to feel that these are still cheating, but I wanted to let you informed. Many will feel that those items were hard-earned however, you may underestimate the effort it can take :)

A million times this.

As I mentioned before, people should be rewarded for hard work and effort. So far in this thread, excepting ATMA eth bugging, there has been too much conflation of the two situations:
1. Spending time and effort to find/craft/cube a great item using the game
2. Using an editor to create items in 2 seconds (or get inifinite money in the Railroad Tycoon example)

That's causing people who are advocating for (1) being lumped in with people who advocate for (2) which is not conducive to a well reasoned debate.

EDIT: Except that nobody is advocating for (2) as far as I can tell, but people have been implying that from what I have read.
 
@ThomasJohnsen I think your analogy with Railroad Tycoon is rather poor when it comes to D2 time traveling for example. It's not like those items just happen themselves. There are people on these forums who have spent massive amounts of time trying to get the very best earlier version items. Of course you are free to feel that these are still cheating, but I wanted to let you informed. Many will feel that those items were hard-earned however, you may underestimate the effort it can take :)

You are ofc completely right on all counts. I have never time-traveled, don't know the effort it takes and the example was a bad one.

But my take on the matter is still that cheating a little bit or cheating alot aren't all that different to me. Regardless of whether you take a long time and only cheat a little bit or you use a quick way to cheat alot.
(NOTE TO THE ABOVE STATEMENT: I don't consider time-travel a cheat per se if used as intended [ie. to forward a char you have been playing in a different patch and his/her items to a newer version]. When time-travel is used in conjunction with 3rd party programs to facilitate version switching and muling to gain unintended advantages in later patches is where my line is drawn. People may be offended when I describe time-traveling as a cheat, but that is what I consider it to be; at least in most recent cases of cow-king rushing for very similar rares forwarded en masse).


EDIT: I mean what if Lance Armstrong told you that all his EPO was really difficult to come by and took alot of work and effort to get. Would you consider him less of a cheat? To me the whole thing boils down to whether or not you consider time-travel a cheat.

EDIT2: I feel the need to mention that I have alot of respect for Grape and helvete for their massive contribution to this site and to the game. Without either this site wouldn't be the same for me. I just feel that this new (in the sense 1-2 years) idea of exploiting older versions to the very limits has gone too far. In my opinion the slippery slope began when especially Treeharl started becoming very active (at least that's when I started really noticing it) in discovering new ways to farm older patches. The general concensus atm seems to be that time-travel in a huge way is a legit and acceptable way of playing this game. And not being interested at all in such things, I find myself being pushed further and further away from a site I have enjoyed for many years. Maybe that's the reason my posts may have been somewhat offensive - I appologize for that. (a ;tldr post if ever there was one, eh? :))
 
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1. I really appreciate that everyone is discussing this respectfully and without flaming other members.
2. We generally don't refer to a certain non-forum accepted mod by name, I believe so that we're not hypocritically and inadvertently advertising something we don't accept here. Can we please agree to continue doing this? I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!
 
Something I would like to point out is this 'bug' is not new. Nor is the awareness of it's existence. It has, after all, been long understood, that if you bring items forward incorrectly they can get "scrambled". What is new is some people have done some testing, (afaik with segregated testing files) brought forth further information that changes a "weird, somewhat novelty, but mostly just annoying accident/bug" into something that can "reroll" items to produce something potentially useable and/or buggy such that it can result in exceeding limits placed on affix ranges/values.

Given that we know how such items are created, that accidentally doing so will be very obvious the the person bringing items forward, and that outright impossible stats on items would more or less be easily spotted in read-outs/screenshots, it shouldn't be hard to make or 'regulate' a rule on this edge case, as necessary.

On the one hand, this isn't much cheesier/sketchier than some of the stuff already possible and accepted in the forums. The most obviously/immediately comparable of which is 107 bugged crafts, which can also result in otherwise impossible values on affix values (e.g. MPK rings, massive LL, recipes that can roll sets/unique instead of just magic/rare, etc..).

On the other hand, it is different, albeit mostly in terms of degree.

For example, the 107/08 stuff is a result of bugs inherent in the in-game crafting process (or different recipe rules), while the buggy rares are a result of a missing intermediate item format (107-109) when changing item formats from (100-106) directly to (110-114), causing a faulty re-randomization of the item. Still a bug with in game code, albiet further removed from 'normal practices'.

Somewhat like... say, a 109 ravenclaw, that in patch is bugged and doesn't use the correct Lv30 exploding arrow value, but when converted to 110+ (and it's new item format) it maintains the Lv30 value, while the patch in question no longer has a bug preventing it from being used. Still, that's one item in particular, rather than a whole host of potential buggy outcomes, and a more organic process.

Or beta runewords maintaining old, clearly-not-intended crazier stats when being forwarded. (Or runes being much more common than 'intended' by HF rushing, etc...)

But you get what I'm getting, at right? Cheese is cheese. This has potential to be cheesier (in degree) than most (though by no means all) accepted practices, but to my mind, it isn't really any worse than any of the other broken stuff time travelling can do. Which, afaik, is already something one aught to report on one's trade/MP profile.

The primary thing that sets this buggy rare thing apart from other timetravel shenanigans, is mostly that it's (relatively) easier to do in larger numbers than it is with crazy crafts, beta runewords, and weird uniques. And that the pool of possible effects/results upon the gear is potentially wider than what is currently understood to be possible with the other things.

While I personally do not think I would bother, I don't really see this as wildly/grossly cheesier or cheatier than things already accepted (and not just the clear 3rd-party-app-required outliers like atma bugging/hotmuling). You're still quite unlikely to get anything that's anything other than a vague novelty. It still a big pain in the butt to do with anything approaching the kind of numbers likely to see any kind of non-novelty result (albiet easier, purely by virtue of the lack of additional limiting factors like rune rarity, or gem/skull availability).

Consider someone pushing the limits of time travel, or some of the crazy cubed jewelry we've seen over the years. If I'm someone who objects to trading with someone who uses bugged items, I'm not likely to make a distinction between 20+ LL blood crafts, prismatic uniques, or this new thing.

Conversely, nor am I like to draw the line at this new thing, if I don't with things like the aforementioned cube bugs.
 
This has been a refreshingly civil thread. I believe we can sum this whole ordeal up in two statements:

1. Taking characters/items backward in time is just no, period. No taking Gray's Sports Almanac back to 1955 and betting on horse races or whatever, that just ends in Biff shooting you with a revolver. Just no and don't.
2. Taking characters/items forward in time is varying flavours of cheese depending largely on the (obscene) amount of effort you're willing to put into a game nearly old enough to vote.

There were some other points raised like "is ATMA a cheat" but it's so entrenched now I don't see a way to undo it so here we are. The victors write the history books, it's not a cheat, whatever. Let's move along.

As an aside, I applaud the efforts of people like Bliss who have made things like time traveling much more approachable to the non-mad-scientist type. I would also support a (insert name of mod here) style of Swiss Army knife that did all of it, the muling, time traveling and whatnot, WITHOUT all the "I also hard coded a duck that gives you infinite money" features.

I would be Pro that thing especially if it were single-click approachable to the App generation, instead of our current macabre horror of editing DLL files and whatnot that we do nowadays to make this game passable.
 
@ThomasJohnsen Definitely don't feel pushed away or offended by anything. Like I said before, you enjoy the game the way you want to enjoy it. I personally have the belief that if it's in the game in any version, people should be able to exploit it, take advantage of it, do whatever you can to enrich yourself and enjoy the game as much as you want. Time traveling to me is definitely not a cheat but another way of doing one of many things that people normally on battle.net could not do. If Blizzard wanted (And they do.. as we can see with always online drm and basically all of their new games) to control Diablo II content, they would just not have ever made Single Player (Thanks Brevik and Blizzard North for our D1 and D2 SP options!). Using a version switcher to speed things up is not a cheat since all a version switch does is switch files on your computer. You don't need a switcher, you can install Diablo II 5 times, and have 5 different Diablo II folder with each of them having the version you want to play (spending about 10 gb of disk space at approximately 2 gb each). After that, you can just edit the registry to the "Save Path" is edited so that your characters point to the right location. That's basically all the version switcher does.. It helps you save space.
 
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@ThomasJohnsenYou don't need a switcher, you can install Diablo II 5 times, and have 5 different Diablo II folder with each of them having the version you want to play (spending about 10 gb of disk space at approximately 2 gb each).

You're telling me that other people DON'T have 5 versions of D2 installed??? :oops:
 
I definitely agree with @Grape about the effort required to get some of the so called "items in question". If I knew something wouldnt screw up and all the effort lost I would put forth the time to at least get a 1.07 Arkaine's and Shako just to have them because the items are 90% of the reason I play this game and have continued to play it after all these years.

A similar experience of mine that I can relate with @ThomasJohnsen, and his experience with Railroad Tycoon is Civilizations 5. I was really liking Civ 5 after playing it for a couple weeks(I borrowed it from my stepson, and this was several years ago of course). Looking back at it now, I was probably stumbling along since I never checked any forums or anything about strategy. But, it was fun as hell and it was a struggle at times, which I enjoyed.

One day while I was playing, my stepson walks into my room, and asked me if I was using the "world editor" or something along those lines. I didnt have any idea what he was talking about, and he proceeded to show me how to use it and it pretty much just let you have anything you wanted at any given time. Innocently enough, I needed a few more ships and planes to guard a part of my territory, and I thought, wellllll, I'll just use the editor this one time. Yeah, the wheel was turning and you cant slow it down. After a few days of just giving myself all kinds of stuff I quit playing the game and haven't touched it since.
 
@ThomasJohnsen Definitely don't feel pushed away or offended by anything.

I don't see how I cannot. Look back at this thread - everyone except me seems to feel that time-travel items are acceptable.

Consider player 1 and player 2 playing dii newest patch. Player 1 has access to overpowered headgear and body, insane rings that fill the blue bulb every kill, +4 skill amulets, crafts that defy belief and +damage charms that gets her physical damage through the roof. Player 2 only uses items dropped in the patch she plays.
Which of player 1 and player 2 will have the easiest time making a decent effort in say mfo, rfo or a similar tournament (which is a huge part of spf) or in pvp?

Anyone not willing to utilize non-patch items in any given patch will be at a disadvantage. And if the vast majority of players utilize such items, the disadvantage will be very significant indeed. And we cannot start dividing "item find threads", "olympics" etc. into several categories of purists (for lack of a better word), time-travelers, mod-users etc. since we barely have enough players to make a decent pool as is these days. The only solution, imo, is that the general concensus wins out and the minority must do as the majority dictates (which means that I time-travel or accept a disadvantage when entering mfo style tourneys or simply abandon spf altogether).
 
I don't see how I cannot. Look back at this thread - everyone except me seems to feel that time-travel items are acceptable.

You can be sure there are more people like you, who don't accept time-travel. Either they haven't had time to comment yet, or more likely they don't feel so bad about how others are playing the game we all love, and it's more of a self-restriction to them.

It's really hard to see the turn of the paradigm totally to only Vanilla playing anymore. It's totally cool for you to come out with your opinion, but don't seriously wait for a ban for time-travel any time soon. Time-traveling has been part of this forum for really long time and this forum would lose many players if it was prohibited.


Consider player 1 and player 2 playing dii newest patch. Player 1 has access to overpowered headgear and body, insane rings that fill the blue bulb every kill, +4 skill amulets, crafts that defy belief and +damage charms that gets her physical damage through the roof. Player 2 only uses items dropped in the patch she plays.
Which of player 1 and player 2 will have the easiest time making a decent effort in say mfo, rfo or a similar tournament (which is a huge part of spf) or in pvp?

Anyone not willing to utilize non-patch items in any given patch will be at a disadvantage. And if the vast majority of players utilize such items, the disadvantage will be very significant indeed. And we cannot start dividing "item find threads", "olympics" etc. into several categories of purists (for lack of a better word), time-travelers, mod-users etc. since we barely have enough players to make a decent pool as is these days. The only solution, imo, is that the general concensus wins out and the minority must do as the majority dictates (which means that I time-travel or accept a disadvantage when entering mfo style tourneys or simply abandon spf altogether).

Time-traveling items have been a small part of some players' MF builds for about as long as those tournaments have been there.

It's debatable if any of the pre, say, 1.13 items are even worth to get when purely going for MFing. 1.07 Shako come to mind, but it doesn't really give that much of an edge. Players 1 is the most efficient way and then the extra life it gives is hardly needed.

Hybrid rares would have potential, yes, but there's barely anyone even trying those out right now. (And it's part of the debate, what to do with them). If I were to make those, I'd probably keep them away from my normal characters now. I was thinking to make some interesting novelty builds around them, if any. Look - we don't all go go for earlier versions to have an edge versus those who don't, we also go for them because of the challenge and the fun. Also, having big life by just your armor and headgear can open up some more builds in the current versions. For me time-travel gives A LOT of versatility to this wonderful game, both in the earlier and modern patches.
 
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I'd say beta CtA and/or 1.07 skullders give the biggest edge in terms of MFing in 1.10+... other than that you're stuck with ridiculous crafts like 40% MF blood rings or prismatic +3 skill + 35 MF amulets... not easy at all to get! (I've crafted hundreds)

Now, for other things like 99ing you can certainly argue that other items like 1.07 shako or beta BKWB are much more useful.
 
I don't do time traveling either, but I don't have any problems with it.

Actually, I'd love to try some of the beta runewords or the challenge of /players 64, but I just don't have enough time to play everything I want to in one patch, let alone all of them.
 
... If Blizzard wanted (And they do.. as we can see with always online drm and basically all of their new games) to control Diablo II content, they would just not have ever made Single Player (Thanks Brevik and Blizzard North for our D1 and D2 SP options!) ...

That would be true if D2 was created in this day and age. At that time though ... not at all. SP was part of the games, often the biggest part, and online play was something getting added to more and more games at the time, but still relatively new.

@ThomasJohnsen As I stated in an earlier post, I'm a bit torn about time traveling myself. And so are others here, I'm sure, so you are certainly not alone. I do agree with @Grape however, that it's not because a lot of people agree with or don't mind time traveling, that they are doing so theirselves. I still have the impression it's a minority actually. Given the high activity in the threads about time traveling (especially the 1.00 and the 1.07 one) and the amount of finds of older patches in the ITF, it might seem that everyone and their mother are doing time traveling though. Also, and again I agree with Grape here, I don't think those overpowered items from earlier patches are being used so much in, and/or have such a big impact on things like MFO and RFO.

Edit: and yes, I'm also impressed with the civilized tone and politeness in this thread !!!
 
Lol @darkstarhub thats not what the world editor is for!!

I always took a peek at it on turn 1 though.. :oops: I've played waaay too many games, getting off to a good start, only to find out there is no iron/copper to be found. Then, you're pretty much stuck with Archers for 2000+ years.
 
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