It's been a long time...

[songmage]

It's been a long time...

It seems so odd. I was googling my account name to see what kinds of things that I may have been up to in the past, but had forgotten. I came up with old threads that I posted here in 2005.

Man. Those were the days. I can't help but remember them fondly. I just wonder why I played this game for so long. This is a game that requires you to log onto every character once in a while, or you lose it. At the peak of my playtime, I had 5 accounts. I had lost suprisingly little during character transfers.

I don't understand why you were required to have a group of people to destroy Uber Tristram (or at least it looked like they tried to make this more a "group" game). It only dropped 1 worthwhile item, and the odds that it gave skill bonus to your class was not good. That's just a recipe for disaster!... unless you had a geared smiter... with items that were impossible to find the runes for, yourself.

Even then, it seemed conceptually broken without gaining items illegitemately. I used to buy items from ebay. I was an avid PVPer. I recently found that you are now unable to sell Blizzard virtual items on Ebay. D2legit is the only option now. It's been available since... before I started playing. I seriously have wondered for a long time if that site wasn't run by somebody who runs the game. They never run out of items and several similar sites have exactly the same items that they have. One time, I bought two of the same item from them, unidentified. After they were identified, they had exactly the same stats. I guess I haven't found anything to disprove my suspicion.

As much as is blatantly broken about this game, you have to admit that it takes some kind of miracle to keep a game on the shelves for, what, ten years now? Walmart doesn't have infinite space to put software.

I wish I had the time to waste on making a few PVP characters again, without the threat of having them deleted if I put it down for too long.

Anyhoos, HI EVERYONE! I hope you guys are having as much fun with the game as I did back in the day.

 

[korialstraz]

Re: It's been a long time...

One time, I bought two of the same item from them, unidentified. After they were identified, they had exactly the same stats. I guess I haven't found anything to disprove my suspicion.

If I recall correctly, stats on unidentified items are decided when they are dropped, not identified. Which is why a duped unidentified item will have exactly the same stats.

 

[omgwtfbbqpwned]

Re: It's been a long time...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN3MGN899yE

 

[songmage]

Re: It's been a long time...

If I recall correctly, stats on unidentified items are decided when they are dropped, not identified. Which is why a duped unidentified item will have exactly the same stats.

Yea. Stats are decided on drop. The thing with duped items, though, is that one always disappears when you log out of a game. These items were exactly the same, but did not disappear.

 

[korialstraz]

Re: It's been a long time...

Yea. Stats are decided on drop. The thing with duped items, though, is that one always disappears when you log out of a game. These items were exactly the same, but did not disappear.

Right. And since the copy of a dupe always disappear the D2 economy is messed up. >_>

While I do want to believe all dupes are destroyed after leaving a game, the availability of high end items lead me to believe otherwise. :whistling:

 

[songmage]

Re: It's been a long time...

I had been banned for duping... a long-*** time ago. Unless they'd changed something, I know that duplicated items have disappeared.

I'm pretty sure that most of what's happening is that either people are buying from d2legit.com (where I'm pretty sure the guy that's running it has control of the servers), or 2, they bought/traded for the gear to fully-equip a hammerdin and attached it to a botting program.

In either case... the point of my thread is that despite the fact that this game is repetitive, nonsensical, broken and tiny, it's done something that no game has done in the history of game-dom...

It's been for sale for over ten years and people have been buying it... for the same price as was set probably eight years ago. You can't deny that it can't be easy to accomplish that.

PLUS, your account name is the name of the server I play on (spelled 1 letter differently, but I assume it's the same). Mains: Stinkyfinger/Soreloser.

 

[korialstraz]

Re: It's been a long time...

There was a method of making dupes not disappear when leaving a game. They'd poof during a rust storm though. So it could've been dupes. But that would be bad for business, so most likely they use bots, which is just as bad.


But yea I see your point, D2 has accomplished something more or less no other game has. I can't think of any at least.

My account name is the name of your server? If it's not WoW, then I dunno what it is. o.o

 

[juju]

Re: It's been a long time...

1.12 problem=dupes 1.13 problem=bots....

 

[songmage]

Re: It's been a long time...

Yes sir! Wow has been my poison for... going on five years.

I tried to play Diablo2 again a couple of years back. My computer froze during the Diablo-kill sequence and it corrupted the installation (that's never happened before). That and other things were enough to make me forget about regrowing old habbits and I gave the disks to somebody else.

While I WAS playing, I started to remember how stupid it was that you were only capable of joining a certain number of games per certain amount of time. I got kicked from the server several times during tristram runs. As a particular player, at a particular level, there's only SO many places that you can peak your leveling potential. Once everybody else leaves the trist run, your potential falls like a homesick anvil. I wasn't about to visit old content in great detail. I'd already done everything a hundred thousand times and there were a lot of parts in the game that I really didn't miss. My goal was on PvP. The less time I spent on nonesense, the better.

It would be fantastic if they'd tell me when I was close to getting kicked, so I could slow down a few, but no dice. Apparently, the measure that they put in place to limit botting is ONLY punishing real players, as the bots are well-aware of how many games they can join per measure of time. New players, however, aren't. After three or four runs, I either had to be content with staring at the blank screen for five minutes, or I could go get some more coffee.

It's funny, though. If they would change only a couple of things, I'd forget about Diablo3 and run back to d2 in a heartbeat. I'm still not even sure if I want to try D3. I know Blizzard's good at making games, but the crap that they've pulled in the past has made me want to reconsider playing another Blizzard game after WoW.

I'd been banned about three times for maphack. Millions of other players have been banned for the same thing. You would THINK that Blizzard would build a maphack-like feature into the game for the people who lost their "wow" for random maps ages ago, but it just seemed too much like a marketing scam. Ban addicted players and you get an influx of new game purchases.

Another gripe that I had was that I obscenely enjoyed LLDs (low-level duelers). I loved to be able to take on the best level 21 players that I could find. In transferring my poison over to WoW, I enjoyed making "twinks" (Somebody should shoot the guy who came up with that name), which was essentially the same concept. Not only did they take away nearly all "twink" gear (which I really didn't care about), but they took away their ability to compete in battlegrounds. They gain experience in battlegrounds. Exp-off function will only disable your ability to join battlegrounds.

There's always an argument about whether or not it is right for a lowbie to utterly smash another lowbie with lesser gear, but it has been part of max-level PvP since the beginning of WoW. You always find some monstrous behemoth with perfect gear, traveling around with his perfectly-geared healer, demolishing everybody in their path. The only difference is the amount of time that it took to MAKE the character. If I spontaneously wish to PvP as a shaman, I don't want to have to make a level 80 one with a constantly-changing set of PvP gear and level caps to be able to play on it.

I guess it's their game. I suppose I should just play CoD if I want to 1-shot people.

I can't believe the length of ulterior tangents that I rolled down. /RANT!