Purists will kill this game early with their fear of change

That is not what that means. On the old battlenet server if you did not login for 90 days (I think, someone please correct me), your character would expire and be deleted.

In the new system, lets say you play a ton and then do not login for 6 months. After that 6 months, your characters are still there.

Unrelated to the above but about old character saves
in the past couple of days, they did say:

the new remaster will still work with players’ original save files, Blizzard confirmed in an interview with IGN Middle East yesterday. “Yes! Keep your old save files,” Diablo II: Resurrected game producer Matthew Cederquist said. “Back when we were working on [the remaster], we wondered if the old save files would work, so we kind of shoved it in, and it worked! So yes, your local single-player save files will carry over.”

Yes, I am aware of that.

You’re being confusing. Do multiplayer characters get deleted or do they not get deleted in the Remaster? It matters because if I get my girlfriend to join in, I’d rather not see her be upset after we didn’t play for a few months to see our characters being gone.

In D2R, if you make a character, it will not be deleted unless you delete it.

In D2, if you did not login at some regularity to the old battlenet, Blizzard would delete your character due to inactivity.

Hope that clarifies

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That is all I wanted to know. And it makes me happy to have it confirmed that multiplayer characters won’t be deleted automatically.

It is a nice feature. Diablo games get repetitive. I like to revisit old games and play new ones. When I revisit an old aRPG, it is good to see my character is still there. Overall, I think the D2R designers are being conscientious to respect both D2 purist and D2 lets improve things crowds.

I personally don’t understand how anyone could genuinely think that characters being deleted is somehow a good thing and that it should’ve stayed.

Back then server costs were more than now. Blizzard made decisions with costs in mind (and still do of course). Now, with server costs far lower, then it makes sense to get rid of this antiquated system.

I think it’s also about picking a name for your character, if no character would ever be deleted, we’ll be left with crappy names.
How it works in D2R (and battle net v2), is that the same name can be used multiple time, so it’s not unique. They’ll append the battle tag or account name to the end of your character name, as I understood it.

I know that, but it is a missleading description. They mean that the realm will be global, you will be able to trade and join games with ppl from all over the world, but there will be physical servers located all around the world, obviously. This game cant be correctly played with high pings, that causes doublecast and other issues related to the 25fps cap. You can check it if you never did by playing with a 105+fcr sorc (8fps animation teleport) form los angeles into eu severs, you will notice that you tpd twice in your pc monitor while the server only registered it once.

I realize the trouble pings cause, but one of the D2R selling points is a global server. They will have to figure out a system to account for ping differentials for players who are thousands of miles apart, otherwise a global server has less utility. Some have suggested in a FFA-only mode to offset item drops to account for the player with the highest ping. Otherwise, FFA disadvantage players who are more distant to the server.

In my example Switzerland and US example, even if you had a local server for both, these local servers still need to communicate the trans-Atlantic information.

The utility of the global realm is to be able to trade with anyone around the world, as trading is a core part of this game. There wont be one global server in one physical location for the whole community, it is just absurd. There will be many of them all over the world with a shared database.

In your example, you will only be able to play with each other if you both join the same physical server.

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It is unclear how Blizzard will navigate global servers where you can play in your party with anyone in the world.

You can imagine that the game is created on the server closest to the game creator and everone that plays in that game connects or the same server.

Alternatively, they can use child servers. If I live in LA and someone lives in Basel, Switzerland, are in the same game party, our trans-Atlantic inputs (I assume that is shorter than trans-Pacific) still need to be conveyed to each other. I may have a Swiss server while the other a US server. These two servers still would need to talk.

Nope, you wont have one us and one swiss server, you will have one us server OR one “swiss” server, the one asigned to the one that opens the game. The 2 servers communication you suggest would even increase the ping it would happen in one global server.

Lets assume you are correct (I have no idea how Blizzard will make this work). If I live in the US and I open the game so the game is on the US server. Hypothetically, my army buddy joins from Switzerland. I assume my army buddy will have a higher ping. There are ways to deal with differential ping, but ping is an issue.

For example, in D3 I can play on any 3 realms (America, EU, Asia). When I connect to the other realms, my pings as you would expect is higher the further away the realm is.

Yes that is how it works and how it will work, as this is a server side run game, your friend will have a high ping as long as the internet connections worldwide dont evolve and you cant fix that.

But, as your swiss friend is your friend, you will be able to share the loot like civilized human beings, wich wont happen in a public game, and that is why ppl wont join games whose host server is located in the other side of the globe.

My example also applies to public games. Will Blizzard indicate if public game (or named games) is local or distant? I assume that they will stratify games to group players in close proximity. For named games, will it be the responsibility of the game creator to give their location in broad terms to avoid people connecting distantly? There are ways to address these concerns by Blizzard or the players. It is unclear to me what will happen with the information that we have so far.

Just go play Diablo 3 and wait for Diablo 4. This game isnt targeted for casuals like yourself who need a game to have constant updates in order for longevity in playing. I and many others have been playing happily for 20 years because of how great the looting system is and the PVP.

If you don’t like it, then don’t allow yourself to be misled by what the goal of this game is, which is to preserve the original Diablo 2+ LOD as much as possible. You get QoL. That’s it.

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They already stated that D2R will have mod support.

I dunno, I’m in the same place as you, and I think that these things were something that still makes D2 special after 20 years.
I’m sorry, I really can’t understand that thing you said about multiplayer chars erosion, English is not my first language, so I’m sorry for that. Can you clarify it for me, please?

Also, my GF and all my friends will not play d2 no matter what, so maybe that is easier for me to be old-rules-defender, I don’t want to lure someone into this D2R experience at all. Maybe some QoL demanders just want to play with friends and afraid that their friends will not play a “20-year-old game with outdated mechanics”? That’s why they try to make some changes, so they could say “Oh no, that’s not the same game, they changed stuff to be more comfortable for you, my friend, let’s play together!”.

Oh, okay. That’s neat then.

Basically the current Diablo 2, the original has multiplayer characters getting deleted if you don’t play them regularly. It has been confirmed to me now that characters won’t get deleted after some time however, which is a good thing.

I never said that, so cut the BS yourself, dude.

Sure it can be better! It’s a 20years old game! But you guys are pretending, that you exactly know, how to do that. And that’s the real BS in these forums! People are yelling about personal loot, but have never thought about statistical consequences, altering the game experience.

In fact you guys have no idea, what made this game so addicting and you have no clue, for what reasons people still play it TODAY.

Let me elaborate only on personal loot for a second and why it changes the game more than you might think. First of all, the total amount of drops has to be the same as for shared loot. If you have more drops, you have more runes, means more OP runewords. → changes the ladder completely!

But if the total amount of drops stays the same, there is a subtle problem with personal loot. Idk, if you played D2 long enough to know, but in general the problem with random drops is: on average, your loot is equally good every day you play. BUT the longer you play the game, the longer become the periods, in which you don’t find a good item. That’s a simple statistical consquence, expressed by the variance. Now in singleplay, this is annoying, because when the variance hits you in the face, you might not see a single high rune for a month. Now think of that: Not only the drops are random, but also, who in the party it gets distributed to. It’s simple combinatorics, that in an 8 player game, you will have even longer periods, in which you don’t see a good item. That might leave you without any good items for 1-2 weeks or so, even if you play like a mad man.

With shared loot, you see every drop and for every single drop, you have the chance to grab it. That’s a completely different motivation, than being completely unable to change your faith, not to get items.

So don’t talk about changes, that improve the game,

!

And there is a very simple solution to all of this. Let the release version untouched! Let the devs play around with changes, when they have the time to do so and let them implement some changes on PTRs in the 2., or 3. ladder. Make it step by step and NOT like the D3 devs did it with D3. They rushed 10 different concepts about PvP, Skill system, Itemization, Inferno mode, Horadrics cube, … and forfeited all of them again, because none of it worked well! Don’t pretend, that you knew, if these changes work!

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