Hello,
My name is Adam and I have been absolutely in love with Diablo II since before my PC was able to handle it. I am know as kain_abel_666 (or Kain) in many Diablo II communities. I have played more hours of Diablo II than every other video game combined in my life.
Diablo for me has always been about community. Every time I took a break from playing Diablo , I always felt saddened because I was always leaving a good group of friends. Small or large, they were always friends whether or not I ever met them in person. Some of them mailed me a CD across international borders when my copy got damage. Ones that had so much fun playing with me they wanted to meet in real life and sit side by side battle the hordes of demonic enemies.
I discvered mods about 3 years ago and started playing an absolutely fantastic one called D2 Enriched. I loved the fact that I could communicate directly with the developer over discord text and voice chat and could impact development. A year later he decided to step back to try and develop a 3d game from scratch. I loved the mod so much I asked to take over development of it to keep our wonderful community of 300 or so alive. He handed over the game files and complete control to me and I was amazed.
We had people playing over hamachi and zero tier - we had trading channels on discord. We have end game players itching for new content and new members joining all the time. It was a truly amazing feeling seeing how much these people enjoyed playing a game I was making. I was taking their feedback and churning out new features and levels and just absolutely loving it. I did such an amazing job the original creator rejoined our development and is still developing today.
About 13 months ago I broke away from that project and started my own. Something truly mine from start to finish. I have spend 100s of hours developing for v1.10 and watching a true passion come to life. Seeing this amazing product that is Diablo II morph into a vision I had always dreamed of.
When Diablo II Resurrected was announced I was so overjoyed. A fresh cut version of my most cherished game. And modding support? Oh my goodness I was in heaven. So many members of this new modding community I had found were overjoyed about the possibility this new version presented. Some had doubts but most were so very optimistic, myself included.
When the alpha came out, I didn’t get access. That was okay. I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t get in. But the game files were there an I got an opportunity to look at them. To study them and learn all the new changes. Most I am still not certain off but I have learned a great deal.
I decided to make the leap, to move my passion of love project to Diablo II Resurected dispite there being no code editing allowed. I was certain I could create a new community soft modded for everyone to enjoy. I have spend 100s of hours since alpha developing something special for Diablo II Resurected in hopes of creating a community like I always had in Diablo II all these years.
By taking out TCP/IP you have effectively killed the modding community. Not only is this taking away from the vanilla experience you promised but it forces all mods to lose their communities as well. Players can no longer join forces against the prime evils but most go at it alone. This is a multiplayer game. It is a work of art and our labour of love mods are no different. We love this game and have been supporting it for years. Why would you take the love and friendship out of this game?
You must understand that dispite your best efforts, people will hack Battle.net. They already have in WoW and StarCraft and Diablo III. People will always make bots and cheat. A community takes all kinds. Yours is no different. To alienate modders because of some bad seeds (some of which we have banned from ours as well) is not a fair assessment.
I suffer from some pretty deep depression, anger issues, ADHD and anxiety disorder. Modding Diablo II has been an extreme comfort in an otherwise rough last few years for me. Please don’t kill my community and our love for this wonderful thing that you have created.
Kain
I sent this letter to the PR email. At least I’ve said my piece. That all one can hope for here.