Switch says hi. No online needed.
I donāt think thatās accurate. Original Launch D3 launched in 2012 and the first ābattle passesā iirc didnāt really hit mainstream until an entire year later. The main source of monetization was the Auction House which allowed for real world monetary transactions (hence the moniker āRMAHā which is short for Real Money Auction House) and it was almost entirely focused on items (it might have also sold gold, I canāt remember).
Whereas ālive serviceā games (which are more commonly called āGames as a Serviceā) usually operate on FOMO in the form of MTX skins or battle passes or accelerated release of otherwise time-gated content, the RMAH simply worked as a parallel economy between players, where big daddy Blizz took a major slice per transaction. They didnāt need to continually pump out ānewā or ādifferentā content because they got the players to do it for them.
All that shut down right quick when several world governments started going āhey now, youāre making money across multiple entire countries with virtually ZERO oversight, regulation, taxes, etc.ā
Literally backwards there. D2 LOD is literally still intact and functional, and in fact is CLONED - formally and officially. D2:R literally runs on top of D2 LoD code. Whereas with D3, the entire reason a āblipā happened last season was because the underbelly of this beast is crusty spaghetti that only like, one single dude even understands, and he had that weekend off.
I wish I were exaggerating there, I really do. They literally had no idea in-house how to fix it. Thatās why it was such a hot mess for so long.
Online-only was singularly done for integrity protection for the RMAH. It literally is not required, as Slothic pointed out:
I vehemently disagree. In my point of view, which is admittedly wholeheartedly biased against ābig gaming,ā if IP holder X isnāt going to support or actively develop a given IP, they should not be allowed to profit off it. It should fall under Fair Use after so many years have passed. Just like Winnie the Poo.
The Slope eventually Slips to where we have active Nintendo lawsuits flinging around trying to trademark āspherical object thrown at sentient objects with chance-based success.ā Thatās where this road leads, and again, NOT hyperbole - weāre living in this reality right now.
I feel like treating corpos as people, replete with legal rights, is coming at desperate cost to actual people, not just in terms of humanities and dignities and even liberties, but also in terms of just plain old fashioned common sense.
The irony of your response is delicious 
I also remember Mr. Wilson claiming that it would be a source for continued support for the game.
Speaking of FOMO, or as I like to call it, āWhy My Wallet Cries at Nightā, thatās just one piece of the live service. The real meat of GaaS is supposed to be like a never-ending buffet of content. But Blizzardās version is more like when the restaurant says āWeāre open!ā but the kitchen staff went home three hours ago.
For a game to properly retire from live service, it needs to do two things:
- Remove the server restrictions and let players host their own games.
- Give players the single-player freedom they deserve.
I was referencing how Blizzard said they lost many of the original assets of the original Diablo 2. āWe lost a lot of the assets, art assets,ā said Erich Schaefer. āIt would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. Theyād have to make them from scratch.ā
Hereās hoping they hand D3ās remake to a team that is capable and competent, who are hungry to make a good name for themselves.
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Honestly, I think I remember him saying that as well. Iām too lazy to find the sauce atm but unless Iām suffering from Mandela Effect, youāre probably right on this one.
I almost spat my tea out at this one. Thanks for that 
I hadnāt considered the art angle. Fair points, sir.
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What?! The latest patch only shrinks the D3 community as many active players (macOS users, I know) are now exiled from the game. Dozens (or more) of bug reports after almost two weeks and I cannot concur that this billion dollar company gives a rip.
Personally i find this season a very boring one, probably worst of all season, with the lowest amount of team-players iāve ever seen over 13 years.
Diablo 3 lost all its charm because its āābalancedāā towards solo play,
it makes it almost impossible to find a decent team nowdays, or those āgood playersā already have their closed cliche groups and never even appear on community chats or any other LFG discord etc i searched.
It is factually faster and more efficient to play solo rather than searching for a good enough team.
D3 is dead thanks to this season.
Out of hundreds of people iāve seen only one singular person knew at least a bit that zmonk 3 support meta + raiment is better than 2 raiments, one single person was playing zmonkā¦ and hes one hell of a good player.
Majority of players dont even try to think about improving themselves nowdaysā¦ its very sad state of the game, the community is literally dead, nobody is using in game chats at all, nobody is using communities, almost nobody is using discord, and even then nobody wants to use voice chat to coordinate very fast GR 150 runsā¦
Thanks blizzard for killing the fun we had in co-op for years with your āābalancingāā towards casual solo players
Feeling like being finished with a game after 13 years feels like loosing a friend,
RIP diablo 3
Became yet another "āsolo-mmoālikeā
I wish you would have provided some solutions.
Iām sorry you donāt like it, but for the majority of its life span, the focus has been multi-player with solo players being unable to compete in terms of materials with split bounties and zdps classes. Itās only at the end that solo players are capable of competing. Too bad for you, but great for a solo player like me.
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If you donāt like to compete, for sure. (Basically you donāt care)
Did you tried HC? Maybe SSF HC? Or Just WD in SC?
Iām so bad at maths!
So, when you come back in a year trying to play the victim card, is it alright if I link to this post? You know, for historical accuracy.
How about enabling the Altar of Rites and Fissures in non-season? These two features lock tremendous QoL improvements to just seasonal play that absolutely make the game more fun and efficient to do resource farming.
And Iām not the only one. See this thread from early 2024 that garnered almost 300 likes (the most I have seen for any one post) and over 500 comments before it got locked after 3 months.
Blizzard have done nothing about this - they just had to flick the switch on a feature already in game. They want us to move to D4 and will continue to focus on developing content for D4 and not D3 any more.
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What? What come back?
Why do you remember me anyway in some exact situation? LOL, who are you i dont even know, i only know i have you on ignore list.
Did you happen to notice i kinda play this game a lot more than i use forums? No idea what do you mean but i will not read the reply, you can be sure of that.,ā¦
Because Now i regret reading that comment ā¦ i got you on ignored list man for a while now, but was tempted to see this once what is going on here.
Strix also on my ignored list for a while,
But anyway,
What competing, with who? with nobody? or with bots? There is no competition in this game, because its dead,
If you need explanation - nobody cares about solo fishing for good RNG for leaderboards.
and if they do, they are either doing that only for the youtube viewership or because they are newbies.
Yeaah well i cant be lazy all the time,
I meanā¦ too bad for the people who will not get top exp per hour with me in a team because they cant play and i prefer solo IF They cant play,ā¦ i do get 11-13 Ts exp per hour so it its much better than any team i had, with literally one exception, had only one good team in those 16 days lol dead game. And even they were annoying to me because they were skipping the open desert map.
We can solo level faster than team meta anyway.
Too bad for them ROFL. 
Maybe the demigorgon, my guy, maybe noticed i complain for a while now about solo being faster / better exp than teams, but this season is dead-er than the others, team play wise.
ātoo bad for meā lol, i just hate solo play but i do if anyway if the teams sux.
Sad the diablo 3 lost all its charm of being good co-op gameā¦ i really wanted this season to be WD team meta or crusaders if not that, but they both suck as hell comparing to monks.
At this point im starting to regret i leveled 6 different characters for testing, only not the wizard, if i didnt waste 60 hours to gear the others id be 4k paragon on monk by now probably, and i dont even play that much, stupid season, too easy game is so boringā¦ i cant
@strix
imagine competing in an easy and dead gameā¦
this IS silly, there is no competition, and its just about RNG, everyone hates RNG, nobody wants to spend 12 hours to push, 12 hours would get me a lot more paragons than pushing is worth
Dark Citadel is grouped content only andā¦ that other place on map. Undercity and Blood Maiden seems to be too unless you use meta.
I never play nonseason, so this would not impact me at all, but having the system in place already, I cant see why they would not activate it for non seasonā¦ perhaps it would make season ladder less attractive to play? So thecsolution would be for them to make seasons more fun by adding fun and intuitive mechanics for both ssf and co-op play.
With regards to your comment about blizzard wanting us to go and play D4ā¦ Hey Blizzard go and make D4 a better game. Not supporting D3, is not going to make me want to play D4.
Retention metrics.
Itās the only way this game continues to add meaningful value to their quarterly reports. If they thought they could get away with it, Iāve little doubt Blizz would prefer to entirely pull the plug on literally everything from all franchises that arenāt directly MTX/subscription based.
They know they canāt go quite that far, yet. But goddang if that doesnāt seem to be their ultimate (albeit not officially stated) end goalā¦
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Well, Blizz is pretty paranoid about their playerbase playing games outside of their scope of influence. I am pretty sure they realize that most people need some variety, so if they keep their older games still on basic life support, players can give their high profile games a break and then go play a game that keeps it in the family.
As with anything, there are probably multiple reasons they keep the D2, D3, etc. servers up.