Hey, i’ve been looking around for any launch arguments or similar things that can force d2r to run in offline mode?
I don’t ever plan to play online and i’ll be running macros and lots of other singleplayer cheating. As such, i don’t want to hook anything into the game while its connected, since i don’t want to lose my game license. 
I read if you close the bnet launcher (including in the tray) then launch the game from the actual exe in the folder it will bypass the bnet stuff.
Awesome, I’ll go try that right now. Will report back! 
I have not tested it, but I think that works. They will have to log in online every 30 days or so, but besides that they can directly launch it.
Don’t use the launcher.
Create a shortcut to the game file (D2R.exe). I put mine on my desktop.
Disconnect from the internet (just one click for me), and then start the game.
As long as you aren’t connected to the internet, the game won’t connect to battle.net.
Doesn’t work. Still connects to bnet.
Disconnecting my whole computer from the internet is going to be my last resort for this. But thank you for the suggestion!
Just to be clear - you checked the overflow menu with the little arrow down by your clock? It can still run in the background even if it is not showing in the taskbar.
Yep, launcher is completely closed. No services or processes related to battle.net is running.
I wasn’t a fan of the idea, either, but like you, I noticed that the game still connects to bnet when you start it directly with the .exe file, if you are connected to the internet.
Disconnecting is the only way I know of to prevent that.
Even though it wasn’t the way I would have liked to do it, I’ve been playing that way since launch day, and the extra step to disconnect first has just become a natural part of the process now, that I barely notice.
Not having to suffer through all of the down-time that everyone else has experienced has more than made up for the initial inconvenience.
If you reconnect internet after starting it, does it reconnect eventually?
I also can’t believe there isn’t just a -offline argument! 
I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know the answer. (Sorry.)
I’ve just kept my connection off while I play, then re-connect after I’m done.
Just realize that when you do need to connect once a month, battle.net will want to authenticate your game and it may check for cheats in your game files. I don’t think we know yet what that authentication entails.
Okay. Thanks. I’ll have to test and make sure. Because hooking in known bad programs is a bad idea if it reconnects and then just goes 
Yup. That’s why I play it safe and just stay disconnected. I don’t have anything that requires my connection to be constantly active.
But if you test it, I’d be interested to hear of your result.
The only problem is that your game won’t let you play after 30 days if you don’t reconnect to battle.net.
I’ll definitely report back. 
Yep, that’s perfectly fine. I’m mostly looking to do some character editing, but since i play modded already, i can’t convert over characters since there’s already a lot of edits and progress. It’ll mostly be memory editing to get more skill points and so.
No… what I mean is that the game won’t let you play it if you don’t connect to battle.net once a month (from what we’re told)… so you may try to log in one day and find that the game won’t start unless you connect to battle.net.
Yep, that’s perfectly fine. I can launch the unmodded and not hook any macros or cheat tables to auth the license. That’d be no different than just launching d2r and not launching anything else.
This method will still attempt to connect to Battle.net, but when it can’t it will auto-switch to offline mode.
It reconnects once internet is restored if you click the online tab at least. So. That’s sad. I might have to just localhost redirect eu.actual instead