Well, what I meant when I said that most duping bugs were caused by that, I meant using a cluster of server to run the game. You give item to player b, he get saved before you, server crash, bam item dupe! So yes, it's very hard to keep track of that, a lot of game don't bother to even do it. I know that in UO, if you could predict when the server was going to crash or induce a crash, you could dupe and that was true of a lot of games.

On a sidenote, we're moving toward a clustering system and yes, doing saves (among other things) is a headache ^_^. I'm starting to lean toward the way of UO, at least at first.