How about an encrypted savefile stored on our computers locally. Everytime we pick up an item that savefile will be updated and when servers fail again, the savefile will be synchronized with blizzard servers when they are up again.
Or something like that, I don’t know. I bet you have some smart IT guys that can think of a viable solution for this problem, so we don’t lose hours of playtime again. :(((
I really like this game but it’s no fun to me when I’m in constant fear of losing items!!!
The only way to avoid a rollback is to stop playing and refund your game until Blizzard can no longer deny spending the resources to fix the issues.
For now my way of avoiding another rollback is to NOT PLAY AT ALL. Until they fix this issue. Simple.
It’s quite simple, don’t play. Haven’t played in the last 3 days due to server stability, will resume play when things get back to normal.
Either of the 3 mentioned posts above is correct, but be lucky with your first topic reply.
It would take precisely 3.2 seconds for your “encrypted save file” to turn into open battle net with everyone running around in whites and blacks.
I don’t even know what open battle.net or whites and blacks mean lol. Something about the big hacking culture that seems to ruin this game?
Open battle net in d2 was a place where you could take single player characters that were saved locally into online play.
So, naturally, people made hacked items with hex editors. Common hacked items were called “Whites” and “Blacks” because they made your character glow white or black.
There’s a ton of reasons why saving character data on your local disk is a terrible, terrible, idea.
Stop playing. It’s the only way.
I have an alternate strategy. I wait specifically for days when they’re having server issues, and wait for the all-clear message afterwards. That was I’m at least confident that I’ll get a few solid hours of gameplay in without my progress being threatened. Playing while things seem “normal” just feels like walking on a minefield right now.
That’s how you get imported items lol. The first rule of networking is never trust the client. The only true way to avoid rollbacks is playing single player until they get their servers stable.
@Bandet
Okay, thanks for the explanation. Maybe, after 20 years, there are ways to ensure authenticity of such save files. 
Whatever, I’m out for some days now, hoping for things to get better!
File encryption doesn’t really “exist”. Nothing is completely secure. Breaking an encryption is just a time sink, and programs exist specifically to do that.
The only real “security” a file has is that it would take too long to decrypt it to bother. But something like an online game, where they could literally have access to breaking the entire game and selling thousands and thousands of hacked and duped items for tens of thousands of dollars online is a very good incentive for people to invest time into breaking an encryption.
Haven’t had any rollbacks playing “singleonline”, I think running pub games is where most of the rollbacks happen. Edit; no rollbacks since first few days of launch anyway.
Somebody lost 20 levels after not playing for a while, so that’s not really a solution unfortunately…
it probably is something like detecting duped items and people who were in games with them getting a rollback.
the problem with your idea is it’s still on a personal pc and if its on your pc you can edit it to say you have anything you want. even if your on a console there are ways of getting the data and re-writing it. the real problem with roll-backs is easy any time you do something it saves it on the server but what if you’ve lost connection to the server? well then nothing was ever saved since losing that connection. items levels ANYTHING. so the issue isn’t so much where the file is located the issue is the fact that we can play the game even though we’re no longer connected to the servers and therefore not saving anything your doing.
people losing their chars are the same thing they lose connection to the server that stores all the online chars so as far as the program can see there are none saved so they don’t show up then latter when the connection is reconnected their back.
(there is also the occasional corrupted file but those are unavoidable with thousands of people playing)
I was on the lucky side too until last night. 2 hours of progress was gone when I logged in today. After redoing the server crashed AGAIN and I had to do it a THIRD time. (Arcane Sanctuary in Hell, I hate this map lol) Really killed my motivation to progress any further.
edit: always single online, no group play
edit2: @Bandet My thought was some kind of incremental savefile which only adds up to the existing server-side savefile. Encrypted with keys that will be invalid after a short time, so there’s not even enough time to decrypt and modify it. But yeah, I hope they just fix their servers and we’re all fine