With the original D2 being left intact along side D2R, if that means the current D2 installers will be left available for players to download, I hope Bliz will do at least a little work on them.
Fix or replace the current installer to get rid of all the errors it throws just by opening it.
Repair the update process when connecting to Battlenet the first time. It often fails and throws an error about a file being corrupted. OR. Make the current version be the download so that there’s no need to update when connecting to Battlenet for the first time.
Host it somewhere that has better than 400kB/s. It takes almost the same amount of time for WoW and D2 to download because of how slow D2 is.
It would be nice to see them cleaned up, though none of these things have any affect on playing the game beyond waiting 10 minutes when installing. They are nothing compared to downloading SC II and D3 and all their patches, and nothing is worse than downloading PoE and it’s patches.
As for #2, just expect it happen when the patch is about finished, then double click the shortcut after the game crashes and you’re good to go.
My concern and hope is that the intent of current game and legacy bnet is to remain up with the 6 month ladder resets continuing for decades to come.
Yeah. I noticed that despite the update crashing, the game seems to update properly. But it does generate a lot of bug/tech reports and frustrate a lot of people. So a clean up there would be nice as well.
I don’t know anything about this. I have 10 copies installed on my rig for this ladder, I run 8 copies at a time, 7 sandboxed, and I’m in no way frustrated by anything.
If you ever want to stream starting a new character on bnet (regardless of realm) and would like an elite barbarian player to play through with, I’d be happy to play along. I don’t swear or curse and I’m not a bigot in anyway, so I’d never say anything cringy or inappropriate on your stream. I’m just putting it out there, and hold nothing against you regarding our banter on the old D2 forum. My only goal it to promote D2 and inspire others to play at a legit and high level. That’s not to say in anyway that I’m questioning your skill level, I have no idea where you’re at. All I’d want is it to be hardcore, because that’s all I play.
Agreed. Those downloaders are so bad I have a separate hard drive with all the different versions of the D2 installer ever released (for when I wanna revisit a particular part of the game’s history or install it on one of my retro machines) so I never have to download this game ever again. I also have the boxed copies but I never know how long those old cd drives will work.
It’s seemingly random when it happens. I did a fresh install a couple days ago and it errored out, yet the time before it didn’t. But it appears to happen enough across all installs that it shows up a lot in the support forums.
If you’re referring to Leviathan the Diablo 3 streamer, that’s not me. I’m just a casual player that still loves D2.
The current downloader is a lambo (garbage car company until Audi bought it) compared to how we originally installed the game with cds equating to a tricycle.
I don’t care about how bad things were in the caveman days.
The D2 downloaders are god awful for modern standards. Mediocre software should never be excused. Hell, even a direct link like what GOG provides for Diablo 1 would be better.
Notice I’m referring only to the downloader, not to the installer after you downloaded it, which is what you would have in your CDS.
I genuinely admire how critical you are. This type of thinking is how great things are made. But I can assure you that D2 downloaders are faster that all modern games I own. I also understand that it’s a smaller game than the 4 modern ones I play sometimes. I can install 8 copies of D2 Vanilla and LoD faster than I can 1 copy of D3 RoS or PoE.
It’s the error in my #2 above where when connecting to Battlenet for the first time after an install, it tries to upgrade from 1.14b to 1.14d. Part of the way through it fails and pops an error about it how it can’t complete because a file is corrupted.
That’s great. I have a 300 megabit internet connection (which gives me download speeds of 30 MB/s on Steam), and yet the download speeds I reach with the D2 downloader never goes past 2 MB/s. I can pretty much download Final Fantasy XIV and it’s 60 gigs of content on the time it takes me to download D2+Lod’s less than 2gb.
Half of my family does medical research and I’m a computer scientist. I have been taught since birth to never settle.
That happens to me every time and I expect and when it happens I quickly double click and it always works fine at that point. I do however agree that it would be nice to have it cleaned up.
I also always get 2 errors after agreeing to the game license at the file location screen with both vanilla and LoD.
I’ve been listening to what you say since the old-old (2nd iteration) D2 forums, and my memory is a steal trap. I remember when you said you were just a hobbyist. If you remember I’m the guy that recommended you as a MVP for those forums.
I said I make games for a hobby. And I was still in college when we had that talk. I graduated 2 years ago and I’m currently working on my master’s degree.
Yeah, I really wish they would fix the installers, because once I connect to Battle.net and patch up to 1.14d and it crashes midway, corrupts my core game files somehow, and I can’t play at all. Sigh. Here I was all excited about D2R and wanted to dip a toe in to the classic to see if the gameplay was still enough to make it worth picking up for anything other than nostalgia.
I cannot claim with the utmost certainty that this may solve everyone’s install issues. And, yet, this has consistently worked for me on Win 7 and on Win 10.
Use the installers for downloading the main game files.
Manually download the appropriate patch(es).
Disable the connection to the internet.
Manually use the downloaded main game files to install both games.
Manually apply the appropriate manually downloaded patch.
Without re-enabling your internet connection, quickly check if the game(s) run in single player mode.
If single player checks out, re-enable your internet connection.
How would I go about manually downloading the patch(es) without them automatically installing? I’m willing to give it a go.
Caveat: I am installing on MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) - which will absolutely still run D2 as it is still a 32 bit OS, and Blizzard still makes the installers available for this OS iteration (see here).
I take it all back! You are enemy 
