As the direct result of the lack of in-game chat, I had a character unexpectedly taken from Normal and put in Nightmare. That was not my desire or plan of mine for that character. Someone else, who was partied with the group, went to the Throne Room and killed Baal, thus moving everyone from Normal to Nightmare. This could have been easily avoided if in-game chat was enabled. However, Blizzard made the conscious choice to remove in-game chat, thus eliminating the ability of players to notify others of what they are doing, or planning to do. Blizzard is responsible for their choice to disable in-game chat and the subsequent devaluation of their reputation as a game creator. Blizzard is obligated, as a result of their direct interference in the game play of Diablo II/LOD by removing in-game chat, to provide options to players who are harmed as a result of Blizzard’s negligence by failing to foresee–and provide appropriate ways to get out of–the mess they created.
I wouldn’t call it “harm”, more like an inconvenience. Yes it is a problem, yes Blizzard is aware of it, yes they are working on resolving the issue, however things like this can take time to fix.
As far as your unexpected venture to nightmare, again it’s an inconvenience which you could have avoided. You don’t need chat to know if the quest is active or not. You could have checked the quests before entering the Worldstone chamber and participated in killing Baal. Had you known this, you could have quickly exited the game. [Esc], [Uparrow], [Enter]. Personally, I always assume the quest is active until I check the quests or otherwise know.
We already have a thread on this, and we’ve already commented on the matter, noting that it is not intentional. I’m sorry that your character was bumped up to a difficulty unintentionally but this bug is already under investigation by the developers. We can’t do anything else from within the tech forums.
Please post on this topic if you haven’t yet reported the issue there. We track individual reports on these threads to help prioritize work.