04-18-2003, 11:37 PM
I also just returned to LOD after a long haitus (~10 months), and after adjusting to the fact that yes, they really did delete my 3 accounts stuffed with cookie cutters and variants from 1.5 years of play, I rediscovered the joy of untwinked play.
The main trading channels are downright scary, but the gem channels have been very helpful for rebuilding and filling in missing pieces of a character.
When I tired of having no mana steal, I counted up the chipped gems I had collected struggling around in normal and offered them in exchange for a manald. Instant trade, someone who cared about trading values probably thought they were ripping me off. All I knew was I was getting something I needed for a bunch of things I didn't need.
Since then, I've used chippeds to trade for some exceptional unique/set weapons, a Duriel's shell, chance guards, raven frost, and several other useful items that would have been next to impossible for a new player to trade up for during certain periods of the D2 economy. When things were soj or nothing, I kept my single monster-dropped soj and resigned myself to using only the items I found. While only using what you find is noble (and the only way to be sure you're 100% legit), it's nice for a returning veteran/addict to jump start an account simply by collecting chipped gems and asking for a few sub-Uber items he/she wants to anchor a particular build (or at least to make solo leveling in hell a little more feasable so I can shop for magic elites again).
Despite the rampant cheating going on in the realms, I feel like I stumbled onto a sub-culture of people who are just playing the game. As someone said earlier, why would someone with tons of l33t ith CCBoQs (or whatever the latest 'thing' is) want anything to do with small lots of chipped gems?
There is still a sense of the ever-present divide between "haves" and "have-nots", except the "haves" are even more of an inbred community of silly cheaters ruining the game for themselves, and the "have-nots" actually have reasonable methods of distributing items to each other without using a duped (or CD2 bug-exploited) item as a trade intermediate.
Still, a clean slate 1.10 ladder economy will be a breath of fresh air (at least for a few days/weeks until the hackers get rolling).
The main trading channels are downright scary, but the gem channels have been very helpful for rebuilding and filling in missing pieces of a character.
When I tired of having no mana steal, I counted up the chipped gems I had collected struggling around in normal and offered them in exchange for a manald. Instant trade, someone who cared about trading values probably thought they were ripping me off. All I knew was I was getting something I needed for a bunch of things I didn't need.
Since then, I've used chippeds to trade for some exceptional unique/set weapons, a Duriel's shell, chance guards, raven frost, and several other useful items that would have been next to impossible for a new player to trade up for during certain periods of the D2 economy. When things were soj or nothing, I kept my single monster-dropped soj and resigned myself to using only the items I found. While only using what you find is noble (and the only way to be sure you're 100% legit), it's nice for a returning veteran/addict to jump start an account simply by collecting chipped gems and asking for a few sub-Uber items he/she wants to anchor a particular build (or at least to make solo leveling in hell a little more feasable so I can shop for magic elites again).
Despite the rampant cheating going on in the realms, I feel like I stumbled onto a sub-culture of people who are just playing the game. As someone said earlier, why would someone with tons of l33t ith CCBoQs (or whatever the latest 'thing' is) want anything to do with small lots of chipped gems?
There is still a sense of the ever-present divide between "haves" and "have-nots", except the "haves" are even more of an inbred community of silly cheaters ruining the game for themselves, and the "have-nots" actually have reasonable methods of distributing items to each other without using a duped (or CD2 bug-exploited) item as a trade intermediate.
Still, a clean slate 1.10 ladder economy will be a breath of fresh air (at least for a few days/weeks until the hackers get rolling).