Once again the good folks at Blizzard released some changes to Diablo 2 that weren’t properly tested resulting in many people losing items that their characters had accumulated while playing the game. The game uses one data packet for character information and a second packet for items that a character owns, and the bug causes the server to lose the pointer that connects the two packets.
There’s a lot of moaning and whining on Blizzard’s forums up the problem (and rightfully so), but it was a story posted at Slashdot that really caught my eye. Michael posted a description of the problem and then added,
Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
I was a bit astounded that someone working for a techie site like Slashdot would actually assert that information isn’t a “real” commodity. After all, if my Two-Handed Sword of the Vampire doesn’t really exist, then neither does the story at Slashdot — both are nothing more than entries into a specialized database.
Quite a few people in the ensuing discussion couldn’t understand why anyone would pay real money (and in some cases, hundreds of dollars) for Diablo 2 items on E-Bay. But supply and demand functions just as well with information as it does with physical objects you can hold in your hand. Many items in Diablo 2 are extremely difficult to find since their appearance is controlled by setting the probability that they will appear as very low. If an object is only likely to appear once per 10,000 game hours, it’s going to be worth a lot of money.