Hello everyone, yesterday a friend sent me a video that guyz from Russia opened their own server. Has anyone heard anything yet?
I’ve heard about this team on Reddit before, as far as I remember they hacked Blizzard’s security in some games a couple of years ago.
How safe is it to play on their server and what are the chances that I will be banned by Blizzard for this? Although my friend assures me that it is completely safe, because servers like PD2 have been running for many years and there are no legal claims against them.
In any case, I won’t take any risks for now, but will just publish the video here, as there seem to be launch details in the description under the video.
Public side, a great Battle.net alternative promising action against botters… Secret side (when your computer is idle), Russian DDoS zombie computer squad.
It’s not legal, I doubt anyone from Russia cares though.
Servers like PD2 are too small to be worth taking legal action against them. They have a few thousand active players, which is a healthy population for a D2 private server but not really enough to be a threat to a corporation like Microsoft Activision Blizzard Zenimax Mojang Bethesda King. Blizzard has taken legal action against servers of their games in the past but it was usually massive World of Warcraft servers like Nostalrius which had over 800k registered accounts and was more crowded than most retail wow servers. Another notorious case was the Fish server which was the most active korean Starcraft Brood War private server, which Blizzard partnered with back when SC:R launched (instead of prosecuting them, they actually made them official), but the server ended up closing a few years later.
D2 servers, especially classic D2 servers like PD2 are probably safe, not because they don’t break ToS, but simply because Blizzard isn’t gonna go after them.
IIRC SenpaiSomething said somewhere that PD2 got explicit permission from Blizz to operate, maybe the PD2 subreddit. I’m too lazy to verify though so take that with a grain of salt.
Having said that Blizz implicitly allowed LoD private servers in the same post when they announced D2R wouldn’t have TCP/IP, so they’d be covered by that anyways.
Despite this change, a form of modding will still be possible. Players will have the ability to modify specific files which include adjusting values of skills, items, and more. However, keep in mind the Classic client of Diablo II will still exist and that is not going away. Multiplayer mods will still be able to exist and thrive on that platform by our community there.
Admittedly they didn’t explicitly say anything about private servers but I highly doubt they were talking about multiplayer mods via TCP/IP.
