It would figure that in my haste this morning I would screw up the links. I actually thought about it once i was on the bus, going “did i forget a tilde?”. And so i did. Anyway, here are the working links:
here
unidentified
identified
proof that it was the blood
A pretty prize for my efforts, i’d say. Btw only one of the chars in the game was mine, the other was a friend of mine who was clone-sitting as well (just in case one of us dropped from the game or something).
Yeti: just a note, before you waste points in it – the 5% on ice arrow adds to the cold duration of Cold Arrow, not the damage. so to double the duration, you need to spend 20 points – not worth it IMO since you can fix the problem with ias in most cases to keep the baddies frozen and increase your damage output.
As for finding the method to predict a dclone spawn, i don’t think it’s fair to attribute that to me personally; rather, i ran into someone in a baal run who mentioned it and i did some research on my own to learn the whole story, hopefully the remainder of this post will save anyone else interested a lot of time searching and reading.
Basically, each gateway (East, West, Europe, etc.) is made up of a large number of servers, each with their own ip address, like 63.241.83.33 (the one that i was on last night when the world event occured). I believe the first three values are the same for all of the servers, because they are commonly referred to by their last three digits, i.e. 33 or .33.
When you create a game on battle.net, it is created on only one of the servers, and anybody who joins your game is also connected to the same server. Every time you create a new game, you’re connected to a new server. I suppose that in chat, you’re connected to a dedicated chat server, but i don’t know that for sure.
Anyway, the next interesting piece of information is that each server has a counter, which increments each time an SOJ is sold. At first i was doubtful that SOJ sales were actually what drives these (or rather that it’s the only thing that drives them), but now i’m not so sure. At any rate, SOJ sales DO directly increment the counter, from what i’ve observed on irc (more on that later). Also, it does not matter whether you are on softcore ladder (scl), hardcore ladder (hcl), or non-ladder (scnl or hcnl) – each server only has one counter, and an SOJ sold in any type of game will increment it.
A world event occurs for every 150-200 SOJ’s sold, approximately. I don’t believe there’s a set number, because .33 took 204 SOJs last night (walked at 3376, last previous walk was at 3172). When the world event is triggered by the counter being incremented, every game that’s running on that server gets the world event. So in my case, every game on .33 got a diabloclone.
Now, this is all nice to know, but it doesn’t do you a lick of good unless you
a) can predict which server is going to walk soon, and
b) know what server you’re on.
But luckily, the wonders of IRC make it all possible. There is an irc channel, #dclone-west (or east i would assume, though i haven’t been there) on irc.gamesurge.net which has a bot that polls the servers and keeps track of what number their counter is at, when they last walked (date, time, and # sold). Several of the ops in the channel keep an eye on which servers are experiencing sale activity, and set the bot to list certain servers as “Active/Hot” and “Standby”, as well as listing the ones that have “Walked”, meaning that they’ve experienced a world event recently and are “cold” so to speak. Basically, you can just hang out in the channel and listen to what people are typing (as well as use certain commands that have the bot whisper you info about the servers) to figure out what server you want to be on, and how imminent the World Event might be.
To solve b), we enlist the help of the command prompt. In Win2k or XP, go to the run line and type “cmd” to bring up the command prompt, and use the command
netstat -n
(you should be in a game on bnet when you do this to really understand what i’m about to say)
if you look at the list of active connections, the one on port 4000 is the one you want (Under the Foreign Address column). So for example, my netstat -n from last night returned a line like this:
63.241.83.33:4000
where .33 was the server i was connected to.
In summary, once you know what server you want to be connected to, create a game, alt+tab out (or use windowed mode to save some time) and do a netstat -n; if it’s not the server you want, leave the game and make a new one. Lather, rinse repeat. Be careful though, if you do it too fast you’ll get the “Unable to connect to battle.net … check your modem” dialog box that basically means you’ve been tagged for 10 minutes or so, and won’t be able to reconnect.
<Aside>: to use windowed mode, make a shortcut on your destkop and change the properties so that the target line reads “C:\program files\diablo ii\diablo ii.exe” -w (with quotes). I also add -skiptobnet to skip the loading screens, and if you don’t want sound you can use -ns. </Aside>
In the end, this is still a bit of a gamble, there’s no assurance that a server will walk anytime soon – it could take 5 minutes, it could take a week; for reference i joined a game on 33 at around 7pm EST yesterday, the server lagged everyone off at around 8:30 by some fluke, i made a new games to get back onto the server shortly thereafter, and then sat there from 8:45pm until this morning. At 9pm i had figured i’d definitely see a walk in the next hour or so. According to Yeti, it didn’t occur until 3am, while i was snugly in bed (which is why i was clone-sitting with the necro, i figured i waited 4 hours, i could wait another 6).
I’m going to attempt to do it again tonight, we’ll see how it goes. From what i’ve heard, you can average about 1 Anni a day with this method, which is pretty nice, though i would bet they’re a pain in the arse to trade since you can’t use the trade window. Personally, it’s not the method i’d choose to get rich quick. A friend and I are currently working on a system to repeatedly get rune drops from the hellforge quest, since we think that will be quicker and more lucrative. Plus i need something like 3xUm, 2xLem, and 1xKo to do some upgrading/socketing, so this is the best way to get those runes short of trading meph run booty (which, i may add, is also fairly lucrative).
By the way, this hellforge rush method i’m working on is capable of handling up to 4 more players at a time, so if you would like to get in on it (a free hellforge drop for very little effort – basically you standing around and coming when called), message me.
In case you don’t want to click the link, the Anni was a 1/20/17/10, 3% resist all off of perfect. VERY nice, well worth the time and effort. Meph also dropped a PERFECT Mara’s amulet for me yesterday too, so i’m a very happy Paladin at the moment.
Whew! that was a handful to type!
