Hey are there any people here still (or again) playing D2?

I've always just played SP and just started again (in SP). Later on, when I'm comfy with my new Necro (fishymancer/summon) I would like to find a buddy to play online with...

raz0 plays.....

Heh yeah i've just started again with friend in battle.net HC Ladder :> It's quite relaxing game still. Runedrop% has been increased pretty much in 1.13 (Found already Vex from NM baal, playing like 2 weeks).
HC is lot funnier and interesting imo because you have to respect the monsters.
Trading is also big part of the fun too (you should try it online).
And the Nostalgic d2/bnet feel ofc from 10 years back.

Yeah well, hardcore is not very suitable for someone like myself since I need to get the hang of things first. I only played Barb back then and I've never really played online. I have been online to look around though, but all this terminology out there is very confusing. And I've watched some youtube vids that showed how people can trick you into losing your gear with trading. That's why I rather first find trustworthy people before playing online.

Yea well the tricking is only possible if someone changes the item to same kind of looking worthless item. Accept-button goes always to few secs cooldown though when you change items in trade window and you can always doublecheck that it's THE item you wanted to trade in first place, before pressing accept.

PKs (playerkillers) in HC are people who you need to focus on sometimes if they try to do something suspicious. Like few days ago some chargedstrike amazon asked that I should help him do "Den Of Evil" in act1. He made townportal just in front of town and waited himself in town. If I went to that portal he could have easily hostiled me and killed me in 1shot (Or I could've survived with some fast reflex game quit ;>.

For new player the trading economy can be quite confusing and you might throw away items which could have been sold for high price. And you might get of course tricked to trade some nice item for lots worse one if you don't know the prices. But you will learn it anyway when you play more. For example 20life small charms are really expensive items for trading.

only DIablo1 duel is real :>

Apparently you don't know about the trick possibilities yourself. Check out this video around 2:44 where they guy explains about the teleport trading trick:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4MezebvItM


Anyway, I'm sticking with SP 1.12a for now because with the D2Multires hack I can play at 1440x900 instead of this stupid 800x600. Blizzard sucks in widescreen support for D2...even in the newest patch 1.13c they only added the option -nofixedaspect which makes the 4:3 window stretch (which it already did for me anyway without that new cmd line option). Looks horrible. Can't believe people aren't massively complaining about this.

Heh, it's more like exploiting naivety of others than a "trick"

Also, high resolution stuff alters the gameplay very much. You can spot monsters on much larger distances and you can benefit from it (e.g. with missile weapons) Also the monster do not spot you on that distance so you can just shoot at them safely.
Also players with teleport have much wider area they can operate in and therefore get great benefit.
Adding support for higher res would mean reworking and rethinking lots of stuff. I doubt Blizzard can be bothered to do it in 10 years old game.

Anyway the main point of playing on server is not trading (where only your own carelessness can trick you), it's that you play 'ladder' game which is quite more difficult but gives you more variety in items and runewords you can have. And of course the special quests (diablo clone, pandemonium event). Those can cost you quite some time (I guess months for unexperienced players).

For me it's not worth the efforts tho, you end up doing endless ball hell runs / mephisto runs (hundreds of them) and other brainless stuff to get all you need. I'd recommend playing 'just with friends'. Maybe try ladder difficulty with some builds that are capable of completing hell on ladder without rare items (e.g. hammerdin).

I play D2 too

Haha yeah sure. Who the hell drops items in ground when trading? There is no real way to trick in trading at all. Just stop watching that youtube crap already .

I play 1.13 bnet with 22" 120hz monitor and the resolution scales nicely for me in fullscreen.


Agreed also with johnny_cz that higher resolution would ruin the game (because of teleport, namelocking etc). Farming one monster is the best way to get yourself bored, yes (zero reason to do that). Getting yourself boosted/leeched by others is also the best way to ruin the whole d2 experience if you want that.

1. The guy explained sometimes you can't use the trade window because of glitches or whatever, but I indeed would never drop trade myself.

2. It doesn't scale nicely with the -nofixedaspect option: the aspect ratio gets messed up. Without the -nofixedaspect it's just 4:3 with huge black borders.

3. I understand the high res concerns, but for SP it's great and doesn't spoil the game for me at all.

Last time I played the latest patch available was 1.11[some_letter] - any huge gamechangers in the later patches?

I play some. Mostly do trading to earn some cash on a forum for the upcoming Diablo 3. Got a bot set up on a level 95 sorceress that runs at night and pick up stuff for me. Yeah, its cheating, but the game itself don't offer me much anymore so I don't feel much about it. Diablo 2 sure is a great game, and I've spent too many hours on it at earlier stages.

Current patch is 1.13, and theres some changes. Could probably be read about in the patch notes.

edit: Only thing I would consider playing without boting, would be Hardcore Ladder. If anyones up for leveling in HCL, be sure to let me know. Boring to play Diablo2 alone in any case imo :-)

Kinda weird to say this because they do bother to get a new 2010 patch out there for this 10 year old game...

Dunno, I haven't played all versions, but if you're interested you can always read the history notes.

What's the point in playing online if you don't know what you're doing and others are pro? That's no fun either.

I just beat Diablo with a character other then Barb for the first time. So I got tons of new things to learn about the other characters, let alone the newer LOD characters. I'm not sure if I continue though, because I can see already how much time goes into it (again).

Because it is mainly a co-op game, and if others are pro that just helps you. Sure, some extreme people take it to a PvP level, but it is mainly just a rock-paper-scissor scheme like most of blizzards other games. And it is much funnier to play with people you actually know, instead of some random german. Sure, I played the single player through in Normal once or twice, but the replay value to play alone isn't that big imo. Diablo2's strength is its multiplayer feature.

Yea but if you review the changelogs, it's changes like different damage of skills, higher/lower drop rates and other minor (yet very important for the players) changes that are extremely "cheap" to do.

I loved d2.. but after WOW i simply dont see myself playing d2 again Did you try WOW btw or any other mmo? I think you would like it.

rikoll: You think people will care about FG(which was invented by a hacker too and is extremely lame thing for d2 economy) in d3? Also, it seems weird to me that you want to spoil legit d3 experience for yourself if that lame fg thing was possible. :s

razor: Wow is extremely boring after a while. It always takes you HOURS to have any fun at all with the constant waiting and farming. Also every mob is predicted and everyone knows their loot beforehand in wow which ruins the whole itemfinding thing (which is one of d2's strongest points). etc.

But anyway I think d2 really requires a friend or group you know and have fun playing with. Alone its pretty boring. And legit hardcore ladder is the way =).

whats so strong with itemfind in d2? you know what you will eventually find there too.... endless runs to different bosses

no skill required, only thing you need is time, like in all rpgs and mmorpgs

Don't waste your time on grinding in MMOs, play more Quakeworld ;P

In d2 classic best items were rares. So it was pretty much impossible to have 2 same kind of items in the whole battle.net (except dupes). Rare items would drop with very random based stats (ofc there is max values for all the features that can occur in rolled item's level). Some people also had items from earlier patches like 1.08 (where some items could have better stats than 1.09->, which added nice spice on the trading aswell. Usually the best items also have really low drop %, so you won't "eventually find them". It would take you years of 24/7 playing to find every rune and unique etc without trading (not even talking about almost perfect rares). :E

Nothing like that in wow.

Actually hardcore mode in d2 isn't so walk in the park like some mmorpgs etc. One wrong move or tele to unluckily strong monsters and your character is dead forever. Add there some sneaky playerkillers aswell.
It's harder to die with perfect items though but it's quite long time that you will get them by playing legit (without buying them with real money or using bots/hacks).

If you like pure skill games, quit qw and go play starcraft: bw :s

I've already outplayed D2 to have any joy from it legit years ago. Or well, as I mentioned, hc ladder leveling with some decent chaps can still be a cool experience. I don't even feel remotely bad about exploiting it. Concidering fg, I'm sure people will care about it when Diablo 3 comes as well. I sure as hell don't have any time to play it legit anymore either. Letting the bot do it's stuff during night, and stash it away, takes up like max 1 hour during a week.

Oh, and matching qw up vs a RTS game when it comes to skill, sounds really wise and logical. Theres a reason you put games into categories. Games are different, belive it or not.

Well, that was kinda my point: if you do something for widescreen users, do it properly (not to go into the widescreen discussion again). I don't care about these other changes either, although I do sometimes get the feeling they also do it to keep things interesting so that people have to rethink about their character building.

I forgot to mention that I don't care about what game requires the most skill... To me, the whole atmosphere of Diablo 2 is just great to me. Just take the music.... it's such a nice atmosphere and the characters in the game tell their story well (nice voice acting). Even just being in the game to appreciate the artwork and hearing the music is nice.

And I'll never pay to play online (so no WOW). That's where I draw the line. Perhaps the new Battlenet will require Pay2Play as well...

Well put, thats what i liked about D2 as well. The story is not spectacular but it does its work to draw you into the whole universe that is Diablo.

rikoll:

It's not about time (which you seem to have more than 99% of qw'ers from stats page). It's about that you prefer cheating over playing without them(very childish if you ask me). Do you cheat in qw too?

Regarding fg, battle.net will become b.net2.0(pretty sure blizz has some new trading mechanics there) and d2fg kids are pretty small compared to the real population that will play d3. Just my thought, feel free to tell different pov.

And yes you can compare them in some level. (both require tactics,predictions,aim,mindgames,multitasking(heh) etc.) never said fps == rts

blabla

Sure, I don't mind spending much time on games that I enjoy a lot. And I have no problems admitting I've spent a lot of time on QW the past two years. I've also used the same nick during the entire time that stat page have been up, and spent probably twice as much time on it two years from now to one year from now, than one year from now to now.

I also played legit D2 a lot some years ago, but quit after a death with a level 98 pala due to lag. I also had a legit 96 HC sorc that suffered the same fate :-). The game simply doesn't offer me anything anymore, I've played it through already in various aspects, apart from checking if my bot have found something really good I could sell easily for fast forum cash. And yes, I expect to use that forum cash to give me a head start when D3 comes out. Boting is commonly accepted, since Blizzards effort to do something about it, is close to non-existant. And competing to these boters the legit way, would be insanely time consuming, not to mention boring. The economy in D2 is already "fucked", because "everyone" bots, and Blizzard takes no action towards it. With fucked I mean uniques and runes and such has really low value, while super rare items with good stats can cost insane amounts. It doesn't bring me much joy, so to speak, but its costs me so little time that the little joy I get from it is worth it from my perspective.

I would never cheat in QW, but I would use everything I'd consider an advantage within the common rules of tournaments in this society. If f. ex rocket jump scripts were allowed, I would use it, no doubt about that. I could compare that to boting, since it is something that "everyone" do, is commonly accepted, and have no consequences. And of course both QW and SC require tactics, aim, predicition, strategy etc, but the way they are executed well on those games are completely different. A good QW'er isn't necessarily good at SC, and opposite. It emphasizes on different kinds of skills, tactics etc.

Well I took it you will cheat no matter what in d3 aswell (that's why I mostly "attacked" you). You probably meant d2 there (?).
"Concidering fg, I'm sure people will care about it when Diablo 3 comes as well. I sure as hell don't have any time to play it legit anymore either."
But for me using fg in d3 would be spoiling too, hopefully it won't work (or if it works someway only with other d2jsp botters). Just can't see anything positive about botters' forum gold.

And yeah no reason to compete against bot users and dupers. D2 is not even close to the same experience it was ~10 years ago anyway, but still I find it fun and relaxing atm after long time.

btw. You should compare it to like: if some people used automatic timers in qw, but people don't care to / don't know how to / don't have enough resources to ban it. You would use it?