cheating

[LemmingofGlory]

No, you can't modify files on another hard drive, but you can modify the information sent to another client within the game. So a cheater "fixes" up another character, which at the time is loaded in memory, then during the next save process Diablo overwrites the save information on the legit's harddrive to match the character information in memory.

Here's what we know:
(1) A cheater modifies a character, and if that data is HIS chardata it's updated and sent to the other clients.
(2) If that data is NOT his chardata, there's no normal Diablo process that sends it off to the other clients. How do we know this? Various other trainers exist which allow for memory modification of other players, and absolutely nothing happens to other players.

So, in order for any trainer to DO what you claim, clients would need to accept anyone's chardata from another client (rather than just that client's chardata). Seeing how terribly dangerous this is, not to mention useless and unnecessary, do you think Blizz went ahead and programmed that in? Do you think Blizz went to all the trouble of throwing in, "If client2 tells me my clvl is X, set clvl to X." ? Does that sound like a useful sort of communication to have defined within the game code?

Since your claim is essentially that "Blizzard added something that the game doesn't even use and allows you to get screwed over," I'm not going to believe you until you can prove it to me. Until such a time, I'm going to operate on the assumption that you're wrong and anything unfortunate that happened to your characters is something you managed to do. For instance, I think it's far more likely your "messed up" characters were the result of misuse of a backup program (e.g. DiabloSaver).

-Lemmy