The End Is Near

[Archon_Wing]

After a hiatus from diablo 2 I noticed a good amount of friends who have decided to take up the game. Some of them have gone far- some are very close to the top of the ladder.

Unfourtunately all of them are simply obsessed with finding the character with the fastest killing power. There's nothing wrong with that until you realize some of them don't even play the game- they use bots and apparently when they do play use every cheat that I would imagine of... There's no space for me there- I don't play with cheaters. But I guess some people will do whatever it takes. Unforunately, I am just convinced that a great deal of the ladder climbers aren't legit at all... as those people that I know have devoted nearly all of their waking hours to the game. Since they are on the top of the ladder, I simply cannot fathom how any team (yes, it must be a team) can be near the ladder and play legitly. :(

From what I hear, there seem to be only four classes in the game- Sorc, Necro, Paladin, and maybe Assasins. Apparently, nobody will even bother trading for something like a Windforce...

I know that people will only stick with the "best" classes. "Best" as in what the b.net populace thinks is, of course. I know there will be cheaters. It has always been like that.

But I am just simply disappointed. The game balance seems to be worse than before. I don't know a single person in real life who plays the game currently and doesn't cheat. Hell, I don't even know if anyone on my friend's list doesn't cheat.

I click on the Join Game screen. I see no quests at all. It was never that bad. If I made an "Act 1 gogog" game someone would eventualy join. Or maybe after a few retries. No luck here. 20 minutes later I'm still alone with the exception of someone that joined and left. There are NO such games. I don't ever recall it being this bad before. Never. There are all games that feature runs. Sure, the runs are in more varied locations, but it's a bit hard to runs when you don't have anyone to fight with you through the actual game.

I was quite impressed at the beginning of season one. There was actualy cooperative play on a large scale. I knew it could not last, as what I saw now I predicted long ago, as a natural evolution of the b.net d2 community. Maybe it really isn't that bad, but I'm just no longer tolerant of it. (Come on, I found more cooperative play in 1.09 then now) I guess I've learned too much about the bad side of b.net, since it emcompasses 99% of it.

I do not blame Blizzard. They might have been able to do more, but there's nothing one can do about the nature of the beast that is the online d2 community.

Diablo 2 is uninstalled from my system. I do not think I will ever play this game again. There have been many nice memories of this game, but there's no way I can go back to them. I feel it wasn't a waste of time to play D2. When I stopped playing in Feburary, I felt that there is nothing more to accomplish in the game. I've never had the uber items, nor top ladder posistion ranking except for a brief moment of glory on the hc ladder when ladder first started. I've never taken a character past level 90 nor have created every possible variant. However, I have created a number of characters of diffrent classes and skills and have felt mostly satisified with what I have done with them. I had seen their skills developed and decked out in halfway decent gear. Surely, I had never come close of becoming godly or achieving perfection, but I just felt I don't care. My characters have all expired, and that might be a good thing- let others take up the fight against Diablo's minions.

It's possible that I just realized that there's nothing more that I want to do in this game. Like some say, everything that has a beginning must have an end. This experience might have just showed me the end for me is here. No hard feelings, battle.net :)