As you know, players items are saved routinely (we have had crash recovery for
just about ever) and chests save their eq when something happens to them (such
as being closed and locked). These both happen often enough that it is very
hard for an item to get saved in two places at once. However, rare
circumstances can happen when a player closes his chest milliseconds before a
crash, while the game still thinks he has it. It is also possible that a
player could get a personal restore from an old file, which was saved _before_
he chested his eq. Such rare circumstances can cause dupliate eq.

The problem is, however, that the duplicate eq is, as the name suggests,
identical to itself. The distinguishing marks, including names, condition,
when it was made, etc, are all exactly the same. As such, there is simply no
way to tell the items apart.

So let's say Player A gets a piece of duplicate eq and sells it to Player B.
Here are the two possibilities:
-- Player A unchests first, then Player B second. Player B's eq sees that it
is dupliated and dests.
-- Player B unchests first, then Player A second. Player A's eq sees that it
is duplicated and dests.

Which is more fair? Well, obviously Player A is more to blame than Player B.
But the game _has no way of tracking this information_. It is literally
impossible, because the setting on items "by the way, when were you illegally
duplicated?" doesn't exist and doesn't make sense if it did. We cannot keep
track of every player-to-player eq transaction that has ever happened, and
searching through chests for anything causes the mud to choke on its own
motherboard. (I suspect if we had a vote "who wants to close the MUD for an
hour while we search for duplicates?" the result would be an overwhelming
"no") In the lack of a better _feasable_ system, the _only_ way to proceed is
to dest an item effectively at random. At least it will be fair half the time.

In a related note, if I was a mortal and bought eq that turned out to be
dupliated, for any reason, I would probably be Very Cross with the seller.

Shinarae Lluminus