For you, but a lot of people feel differently which is why the concept has been successful in other games that are very similar to D2. Hell, even D3 got a solo self-found leaderboard and that game doesn’t even have trading to begin with (outside of drops during a play session).
SFF should not be used by botters.
After playing a week of season 10, it’s making me want SSF even more. I enjoy setting a competitive goal each reset. Not only for D2R, but for other seasonal games as well (PoE, D3, even WoW Classic). D2R is in a unique niche where it’s practically required to have certain things to be competitive on the current ladder: a dedicated group of 7 other people, trading, and botting.
I’m not saying to remove these things, just to simply create an alternate league where none of them are present. Group play is fun. I’ve done it plenty in the past with other games. But it is exceedingly difficult to coordinate schedules with 2 other people now, let alone 7. I’ve also built my own groups in the past, but hoping for a party of strangers with the same schedules, goals, interests, and even personalities is just wishful thinking from my experience. Moreover, I’d rather not have to rely on others to gain a competitive advantage.
Trading can be fun, but it can also be taxing after a while. It requires a lot of downtime, patience, and social engineering. And there’s something to be said about progressing using nothing but your own ingenuity.
Botting. It’s against ToS and you shouldn’t do it, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hold up the economy, especially the rune economy. If the thousands of botting cafes (located somewhere) didn’t exist, “no one” would ever have any high runes to trade because of how rare they are.
This brings me to SSF. Getting rid of all these things in a vacuum would create a more competitive ladder for solo players, but some would also introduce consequences. No groups means gaining XP in endgame would take more than twice as long? I haven’t studied D2 ladder progression in depth, but looking at d2emu it looks like 1-99 takes anywhere from 60-100+ hours, and that’s for the fastest people, in groups, getting funneled all the items they would ever need. That’s easily 200+ hours for a solo player to achieve the same thing. No trading would slow this down even more. And no bots to hold up the market would make meta runewords practically nonexistent.
So in order for SSF to work and still be on par with the SSF experience of other games, I think they would either have to adjust XP somehow in this theoretical SSF season, or make high runes more deterministic, or both. Imagine if ubers had a 25% chance of dropping a HR or something. Or we had another Hellforge-like quest we could do. Or Countess turned into uber Countess every 4 hours or something where her rune table was massively upgraded. Just thinking out loud.
Make no mistake. There is a fine line between introducing SSF as it is with no changes, and introducing significant changes to the game to make SSF more palatable. I believe there is a balance somewhere that could make this work. Please give this some thought!