@ThomasJohnsen About tournament unfairness, it could be easily stipulated in tournament rules "no items or characters originating earlier than patch X allowed"
- If X is 1.07, the tournament disallows easymode SoJ, the second strongest MF jewelry, and any hybrid rares.
- If X is 1.08, the tournament disallows crafts with magic-only affixes and/or 3 sockets
- If X is 1.09, the tournament disallows "1.07 eth" weapons, the MPK rings, the OP "vita" uniques and damage charms. And any easymode leveled characters.
- If X is 1.10 final, the tournament disallows beta BKWB, 4, 5 or 6 socket magic items, and the beta runewords
Each successive patch would of course also disallow anything disallowed in the previous patches.
As for "taint", resulting in faster/better MF runs to get current patch gear, think of just how many pit runs could have been done while someone:
- spent tens of hours playing through 1.00 from scratch, with all its bugs and underpowered items
- spent hundreds of hours leveling their character to optimize gambling
- spent hundreds more hours actually goldfarming and gambling, which is much more of a hassle than in 1.07+
- spent hours thinking about what items to keep, and what to ignore, since the odds for getting something which would be the definite best item in that slot would be highly unlikely
- spent hundreds of hours in 1.07 racking, farming, crafting and banging their head against the wall when they finally found a decent rack and it drops 40 greens before the unique
- spent tens or hundreds of hours getting that +2 all beta BKWB to get a very slight edge in their 1.13+ runs
Probably like 100 000 runs, for the most effective runners around here.
So as long as the time-travel gear isn't used IN the tournament, I don't see how it has any effect on it.