While the game may seem dormant from the absence of new content (blizzard’s decision to move its devs/artists to other projects), it remains one of the best game in its genre which is Completely different than Diablo4 (D3R). I won’t expound on this point despite it being Objectively true and not subjective.
Players around the world connect to play every now and then because the heart of gaming is a quick escape. Ideal games tend to not keep you from attending life. D2 is more about trading and quick runs. It’s not difficult, but you can push to 99 quicker if you know the ropes & want the slight bonuses to min/max. There are multiple endgames that are Compelling despite the game being limited to 5 acts. All of this brings me to the culprit and the strength meeting at one bottleneck: Storage. The game revolves around it. You enjoy pvp? = You need storage for your items to switch. You love to trade? Storage. You love to mf? Storage. You want to reroll items? Storage. You want to craft? Storage. The entire game revolves around it and regardless of how you look at it, you end up playing tetris rather than Diablo2. Mules were obsolete 15 years ago when POE offered stash tabs for money and it was expected for D3::: everyone complained endlessly despite the fact that all builds revolved around set items (cuts down on the loot you keep by a LOT. Itemization comparison from a game to the other? Arcade logic vs MMO = not the same realm. D3 open the door for Diablo immoral and just monetizing all aspects of a game. I don’t have to explain what’s wrong, here). The same complaints Raged in D4 and you eventually caved and offered it vs gold. In D2, you could make the argument that you can buy another account (in d2Lod it was virtually endless), but that’s the same idi ocy (I chose this word carefully, it’s idi otic) as saying “play another game if you don’t like that we are incompetent when it comes to logic”. By not offering something your players want to make their experience more pleasant, you create frustration. Not the type you want to overcome, but the one that makes them quit buying your games. Literally. Sure you’ll get new customers, but your reputation is down the shi-tter. On youtube everyone is openly against Blizzard for some egregious mistakes none of your gamers would’ve made. Raising the level cap of your character = Terrible mistake. Wow and D3 did it and it just makes your players feel like you can make their previous efforts and achievements completely worthless. Same goes with loot in D2 because they like the game and want more of whatever they have found. Give them an option to keep it or filter it. No harm if you don’t (buy more tabs) and benefits if you do. It’s also a terrible feeling to be forced to mule stuff /sacrifice a character slot, play tetris, discard items you want to keep/played a while to find. I was never a proponent of Stackables as everything can be used/feels more useful this way aside some slightly outdated uniques, but the conversation ended there before you removed the employees from this project. Uniques were also something that was put off to work on server stability as you just let the interest die off as exploitation begun [bots] (still cool to find when doing a playthrough, but I would’ve adjusted the ed% ranges on those uniques so that they’re all worth the upgrade). Heck, I’ve recently discovered that you can reroll a 1socketed base to become magical and you, obviously, can reroll magics. I already wanted to use recipes from chipped, el and eld runes (I’m a veteran and this can lead to the top gg caster items)… so buying a full stash tab of el & eld runes would make me happy as a LOT of d2 players I’m sure. Whatever it is that we want to buy these tabs for, About less than 5% of the people I’ve spoken to ingame agreed that they’d spend for tabs. The rest just didn’t have more than 2-3 characters and used most other character slots for mules (the same issue I covered earlier… terrible feeling. Direct comparison from stash to filter items = so much more pleasant, too).
As for any change, the transition is important. Just offering stash tabs for money (my suggestion) is Basic [in a loot-oriented game], but why not advertise that you intend to do this by Resetting all of our socket quests. Everyone would come back. This was done with the akara/den quest to reset our characters during one of the previous ladders. I would assume you did this to hype-up some other project (manipulation) because that’s your reputation, now (not the “dev”/last employees of this game, but the company).
Heck, I’d even go as far as to implement changes to the ladder to ensure that Everyone (literally everyone) comes back by adding these two things:
- 1% chance that the unique item you find is the 08 version (most are bad, but the nostalgia would be a contributing factor for the sales as nobody would want to let go of these).
- Allow for the creation of hybrid runewords on Ladder Only (bases retain the previous runeword once hel’d in the game you hel’d it). These runewords would vanish after ladder ends thus creating an economy sink, but an unparalleled will to play ladder for the multiple thrills of that extra humpf in dueling / pvm as several builds would be possible.
This, in conjunction with resetting the socket quest next ladder (and maybe insuring that bots are Systematically banned instead of periodically → will make the sales of said tabs skyrocket as your playerbase will be confident that there’s a functioning brain at Blizzard – yes offense. But that they can trust you to do the right thing… which is unprecedented given your current reputation). While I don’t ask for anything to Take these suggestions as your own, I wouldn’t be opposed to getting my name on one of the uniques: ishibim.
It is sad that it is also one of the only 3 suggestions that was necessary for us to enjoy this game thoroughly (based on a survey I’ve made with hundreds of responses) and 2/3 top suggestions were intuitively implemented [no more realm down: catching more humans than bots=was the initial intention, selling endless storage as 2nd and no more character expiration] since before the game’s release and periodically ever since it did. All the streamers and content creators of this game have made a video about this, too… It’s such a no-brainer decision. The question: To sell something people want for money or not. Let me think about that for a second. The answer was yes centuries ago about everything and anything. Your boss would sell farts if he could. There’s probably a guide for that but it would take more efforts than this.
I don’t seek to make this topic popular… just seen by a few working neurons at blizzard and voilà, you will be loved/promoted and whatnot. To everyone that have read this thank you and… learn to care or teach it. There’s no valid reasonable justification why DJTurd was elected. Somehow, I just had to add this last bit. Good people recognize each other and should call out evil when they see it. He was evil 60 years ago I’m not sure how people didn’t catch that from interviews he’s made, but hey… let’s just let the narcopath (diagnosed npd/narcopath) act with impunity for decades.
- Your Canadian friend.