I've heard about it, but what does it do and how do you do it? It sounds interesting.

I would also like to know about the disconnecting loot trick, if somebody would like to PM me =)

The disconnecting loot trick is easy, is done a lot everyday with groups. Yo ucan do it with your own chars or with other people.

Say you have two people, each with two toons on their account - one higher, one lower (although not necessary). The two people log on with their lower level toons and group, then they enter an instance - say RoC to farm. When they enter, one logs out (DOESNT leave the group) and logs on with his other char and gets into the group. HIs other toon (the original one) is still technically in the group, but just labeled as "disconnected". The other person does the same, and now the group is technically "4" people strong, but two of the people are actually the two players own lower level chars.

The trick is, disconnected toons still get drops when they are still in the group - even if disconnected. So two people can farm for their toons together - they won't get any xp but the drop %, etc will be upped because of this. Also, if you log from a lower to higher level char, the instance is already set to the lower level - so the same idea as grouping with lower level players than you. Switch back after killing the boss, reset, then switch back again after entering.....Voila!

Easy as pie - and not against any real rules or an exploit. I know, because IM the one who brought it up when I first started here. It's done all day every day, lol. It may seem like its somewhat unfair, but technically, if it WAS four individuals and one had a computer prob or disconnected and planned to come back in 10 min, its not fair that the person doesnt get their drops.

Plus, doing it yourself or with two people, you have to switch back and forth all the time if you want all the items/gold. Most ppl use it just for rbw farming sometimes. And just to reassert, its NOT self-plvling since one of the chars is disconnected and doesnt get xp when so. Self-plvling is when you're running multiple instances and grouping your own chars together. ALSO done extensively and on every MMO out there...



Edited by Teclis (04/14/08 08:19 PM)

LOL did you miss the "PM me" part of that ... dont really know that the devs want that put up.

Meh, been talked about before a couple of times. Like I said, one of my first real "bugs" post was about that and self-plvling - and I was soundly flamed and tromped like the "nubcake" I was to the subtle nuances of serious playing as it may seem.

I even think that one of the devs responded to it, or someone had a direct convo with them and they responded so in game/forums. It's not an exploit since anyone can have as many accounts they want to have and run as many of them as they like all at one time - its technically no different one person having multiple accounts than as many individuals having those accounts.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, since if it was a rampant problem it would have been fixed by now (and it happens in a lot of MMO's; and certainly all the large ones). They may fix it somehow, but I don't see the need. It's actually more work than its worth most the time.

People do the exact same thing in pvp btw to up their "win" count - killing their own alts. Silly, but if people want to go through with it that bad, then so be it I suppose.

Plus, DOOMS just wanted me to PM him so he could secretly skittle himself out and plvl his own guys to beat down all the other dev's chars in the weekly "Dev Deathmatch" in the office! They used to have REAL matches with inflatable weapons and ketchup (or catsup if you so choose) packets scotch taped to their bodies to simulate "wounds", but now that they have that in office camera feed they've been frowned upon....lol.

lol... yeah even i know about this one... it's to much of a headache to keep switchin back and forth for me to use it..

now since i do dual box i have used the lvl 1 trick to net bogey so much needed gold... ran into sally again... and the sad part of it is almost everything i keep buying is for steele:)

Gary

It's basically a consequence of loot and group mechanics:

1) Back in beta, the loot for the disconnected person would actually go to another party member. For example, one player would login at least two accounts, group, then log off all but one character. That character would get the loot for all of the disconnected characters, although I believe that character also had to fight on the increased group difficulty, too. I actually documented this as part of the reasoning why a difficulty slider would be a good idea.

Linky...

2) Players that disconnected or died in battle wouldn't get any loot if zoned to resurrect while the boss was killed. That was very painful to a lot of players.

3) A player can easily run two sessions of DR concurrently, thereby eliminating the need to disconnect one character. Just alt+tab between accounts. Back on the beta boards, when us testers wondered why there was only one char/account, we were told that the one char limit was due to security restrictions and that the game was designed for us to be able to run multiple sessions at a time.

In this case, since the loot is still attributed to specific players, regardless of connection status, I don't see the harm. Frankly, it's a hassle to log the chars in and out to collect the loot and or trade it to the other party members. As far as I'm concerned it slows down looting and farming considerably. It's not like the loot for the disconnected characters becomes FFA...

All-in-all, I'd be just as happy if they removed the ability to run multiple sessions concurrently.

Ripper has spoken!

All further questions regarding this matter should be directly addressed to him via pm...

Thanks for the input Rip, and its neat to see that the devs said that the game was thought of to run in multiple sessions...hmmm. Wonder what they were thinking.

I don't know about removing the ability to run 2 sessions at once Ripper.There are times when I need to trade gear down to my lowers and being able to call up the mule is a great benefit.
Now if a group bank page was added so that all the toons on one account could access all the gear on that one page then I could live with not being able to run 2 sessions. But then of course what could be put in the group page would have to be limited. Possibly not being able to put potions in the shared page.

Of course I could just actually run them on 2 pc's but that's just a pain:)

Gary

The easier (and cheaper) way is to install Virtual PC or VirtualBox and run a virtual machine at the same time. I do it and it is much smoother than just running a second instance of DR. I can even play DR on my Linux computer which has VirtualBox on it. Fire up my virtual XP machine and run anything I want, fullscreen. There is a Mac version too.

After reading this thread, I give it a try but the result seems not worth the trouble. I'm currently at lvl 28 and farming Vergrim at insane level. Yesterday I tried to create a new lvl 1 toon, then group my lvl 28 (leader) with the lvl 1 then go farm Vergrim again. All I found is the difficulty seems same as when I solo with my lvl28 toon, but the quality and quantity of loot is worst than solo. I can understand the lower quantity as the loot is divided by 2 for each toon, but I don't quite understand the lower quality part. The loot for the lvl 1 toon are all low level (lvl 3 to lvl 5) green items, which is ok. But there are least purple items for the lvl 28 toon, and the level for the loot are a couple levels lower then before when he solo.

I think the difficulty will be lower if I had the lvl 1 as leader, but will that cause the loot quality even lower as the difficulty is now lower? If so I think the whole grouping thing is not worth it, as I has no trouble killing them solo, grouping may be just make it easier but the loot is way worst than solo. Am I doing something wrong?

Yes, the thing you did wrong was to not have the lvl 1 as leader and have the difficulty on insane.

Insane for a lvl 1 is a lot easier then insane for a lvl 50, so use your primary to do the killing and watch your level 1 rise as if by magic through the ranks....

Exactly - you're supposed to have your lvl 1 as the leader on insane, enter the instance, then switch out to the 28 to rock veregrim. Watch the loot % (and the +health% also for the enemies). Your level one is designed to be the beneficiary when by yourself, although the lvl 28 should still at least make some good gold amounts. With other people however (say a full group of 5 around your same higher level chars level, having this lvl 1 in the group is widely used, and you can get the +loot% way up into the +4000 and even +5000%, range! Of course, as said, the monsters also get +1500% health, but thats the idea of having the higher levels hanging around since it shouldn't be overwhelming at the "reduced" difficulty.

So, grouping by yourself is not about getting better quality loot (or same quality of loot but faster), but just power leveling your younger toon? If that's true, than I guess that's not really what I needed right now. Thanks for the detail explaination.

To clarify, you can only powerlevel yourself if BOTH toons are logged on at the same time - that would require having two seperate accounts both running DR seperately and logged in separately while grouped together. You then just tab between your instances. This will both powerlevel the lower toon and give greater loot.

The "disconnected loot trick" as the topic title was originally about, is when you use ONE account, log in with one of two chars on that account, then group with someone, LOGOUT (not leave the group - leaving that char as "disconnected" in the group roster). Log in with another char, and get into the group, thus having your two chars (one connected and playing, one "disconnected", but they both get loot drops). The disconnected thing can also be done solo with TWO accounts as stated above, but by leaving one "disconnected" - although that would be silly since you should just leave them both connected to plvl as well as get the loot benefit.

lol...this has turned into quite the lengthy discussion eh? And I thought I was "helping" - I may have hurt some people in the long run.

Teclis you are by far not the first person to discover this trick, maybe the first to say something about it but not the first. So dont take full credit when its not due as I can name a toon that knew way before you and did it alot back in the day. That toon is Wreker and before you say well i played before him and did this and that, well wreker is the one who started the whole trend with just one alt.

funny thing is atleast 2 of my posts have been deleted from this topic by the mods. I told the truth on how to do it the best way with lvls and such and know they know.

What makes you think Telcis was claiming to be the 1st or trying to take full credit? Is wreker your toon?

I was just passing the knowledge around so to speak. The people (person) wanted to know, so the people were told. Like has been said, what people do with it is of their own volition. I was making a joke about "hurting people more than helping them" because it seems the explanations and the follow through were giving people brain cramps, lol.

I, in no way, take credit for it or even agree/disagree with it in any way - it's just there and people use it, as have I, but personally feel it inefficient in most cases. Sometimes its just fun.

I wasn't trying to blow a whistle or anything, just answering the question that was put forth. Believe me that I understand self-plvling has been around for a long time, and I learned the disco trick here on DR WAY back from Clamm matter of fact when I was still fairly "noobish." I'm also fairly certain that the devs are very aware it can be done and occurs - since people talk about it all over, more than myself obviously knows about it, and, they programmed the game to do it after testing in the early stages.

So, it seems this topic has been thoroughly stomped flat. Nothing much else left to say or talk about....

After a couple tries and all the detail information provide, I finally able to get it work. Thanks Teclis and Cthulhu. However, I still found its not that useful, at least for myself. My main purpose for trying all this is just trying to get better equipment for my main toon, which is the highest level among all mules in the group. Yes, it did make the boss super easy to kill compare with solo, and the no. of loot is also higher (which I mangered to get up to +1400% loot in my group), but the quality of loot is just not worth to mention, and so far I didn't even keep a single one. That's kind of defeating my purpose. Most likely I will just back to solo and forget about all the troubles in running multiple instances and log-in/out.

2 lvl 100 + 1 lvl 1 = +4800% loot:)

the gnome is gonna need a tucks pad after poopin that much stuff out:)

Gary

HEHE ... have had in the +6K range before ... and yeah the gnome will be hurting after that