Realm game keep-alive oddities

[Ferengi]

I strongly suspect this works for the Countess chest.

Yes and No.

For many games in 1.09, people ignore the Countess as too time consuming. When I learned that it was a good rune source, I began running the Countess. I noticed that sometimes the chest opened and sometimes it did not, eventually I started joining public games with a char missing that quest in order to figure this out some. Joining games that had the Contess quest available (generally in NM) did not open the chest. Because of the Hostility nuisance, I rarely partied in such games. I never found a reason for the eariler chest openings. But the chest in not involved usefully in the rune drops, so the matter was dropped.

Since initially, I had been doing the normal diff Countess to gain practice and in such games, I would party, provide a requested waypoint and move to my task, I suspect that may make it work, but in a useless difficulty . What I do remember is that it happened for awhile and then never happened again.

It's certainly true for the Duriel staff opening. Quest status is a state machine and stored with the character, and you are storing and reloading whenever switching games, so the other incidents you cite are no surprise. I'm sure I've seen 3 maps saved, and perhaps 4.