Latest edition of Blizzard Insider released

[NiteFox]

It does mean that you were able to be super sneaky ninja type and get past all the monsters that would otherwise kill you.

Stairs down was right next to stairs to town on 13.

Teleported like a mo-fo to the stairs in 14. Good job too, bow Rogue and there were some huge packs of Drakes.

Struggled through 15. Died about a zillion times.

TKed the levers on 16. Whomped Diablo in one round with l33t Firewall skilz. (And I do apologise for the elite speak...)

[Quark]

Warcraft: Adventures

'Nuff said. If Blizzard is not happy with a title, they'll drop it.

[Roland]

That was pre-Vivendi Blizzard. Things are different now, as we can plainly see. Which was my point. What was once true then may not be true anymore.

[CelticHound]

Ya know, Bolty, I still think Blizzard implanted some kind of mind control device when you visited them. :o

Aside from the "whole new game" thing that Roland's already mentioned, I member a couple other things from your post visit debriefing on the old, old (old?) Lounge. (It all started when I asked about gambling scepters/staves/wands - before the implementation of the "it's not gambling if you can actually win" policy - listening to people on the has really hurt the game in some ways.)

there's so many changes that they've (as usual) lost track of them all

So interpreted literally, they don't know what they're doing for 1.10? ;)

Actually, the one that got me going was Geoff's post in the Blizzard forums:

If Blizzard didn't care about Diablo II they wouldn't continue to fix hacks/cheats (do it all the time without announcement), they wouldn't be planning on addressing hacked items, they wouldn't spend any time working on the realms or have the free realms (they cost $$), they wouldn't be working on 1.10.

I don't know why, but my reaction to Geoff's posts are often an applaud/strangle combo. The paragraph above deserves a strangle - much like Bolty's latest LoungeRant.

1) If Blizzard didn't continue to fix hacks/cheats, they would lose credibility for their upcoming MMORPG. So it's in their financial interest to release the patch.

2) The free realms were and are a selling point for D2. A much touted feature that gave them extra revenue. If they dropped support for them, again, they lose credibility and future market share.

3) Blizzard employees are gamers too. A software company has two major assets - their trademarks & codebase, and their development staff. The first represents what they've done in the past; the second is what will allow them to execute in the future. Putting out this patch to keep the staff happy is perfectly sensible from a business perspective.

Add to that the notion that releasing this patch creates good will from gamers who don't think things through and it seems to me that 1.10 makes perfect sense.

[BTW, if someone had already said something similar on the old Lounge, I apologize, but there's no archive to search.]

-- CH

[FoxBat]

And The Lost Vikings on GBA proves that. :P

Like the game or not, it's not up to the same quality as their other blockbusters. Partly why it wasn't a blockbuster in it's day.

[WarLocke]

The Lost Vikings was great! I remember renting the original back when I had an SNES (Pretty sure it was an SNES, may have been NES though). That game required some mad skillz.

Then again, I always have found the various Lemmings and Worms games strangely addicting... :blink: