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Comment by starwed | Hacker News Reader

>Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game.

[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.

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There is nothing specific about how Diablo 2 did items that enabled duping. Nearly every MMORPG has had bugs that allow duping. You are working with distributed systems with tens if not hundreds of ways of interacting with your inventory and have to make sure they all work properly even when an attacker can crash your servers at any time during the processing. This all has to be done while at the same time allowing massive amounts of transactions to occur simulatenously. It is not an easy thing to deal with.

It might not be such an issue either, because with a subscription-based game like WoW, item rarity has more value to Blizzard because the longer it takes to get an item the more subscription revenue they get.

With Diablo III being a one-time purchase, item duping would devalue items on the player side and may or may not result in increased commission revenue for Blizzard (depending on how many players will actually purchase the item on the auction house).

>Does WoW have duping problems?

Not really. I can recall just one time where someone found an exploit to do so, probably 3+ years ago, which was handled quickly.

There have been some duping bugs in WoW, but I think they're gone now.

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