A final hurrah for a game that was dying a slow and painful death.
I thought playing Online would be even more fun, but I was in for a shock. Nobody online played the game as intended. They exploited every bug and loophole to max out as fast as possible. The in-game economy was almost completly non-existant, and the online playerbase were ruthless. They merely had higher level characters rush them through the games story by exploiting loopholes in the games coding, then after powerleveling their way to max, bought all the best equipment from online sites and then went around killing and otherwise screwing over anyone weaker than themselves. Only certain classes and builds seemed effective in higher levels of play, and duping and hacking of items ruined any semblance of balance there would have been. ...Then came the expansion.
Diablo II - Lord of Destruction introduced fixes for many of the bugs and exploits, added new classes, items, and even a whole new final act with another stronger final boss. It seemed the gaming environment was saved... until the players learned new ways to accomplish old tricks. Duping and Hacking still ran rampant. Rushing through the game and power-leveling was just as easy as before. The trading environment got even more hostile, as the harder levels added required even more powerful items, which could be bought from Ebay or various online sites who exist soley to sell Diablo 2 items. Many of these turn out to be dupes and would eventually vanish, leaving you wit hnothing for your money.
Meanwhile, the in-game economy hadn't improved. Gold was worthless save to buy potions. In order to try to keep some kind of balance, Blizzard raised the difficulty and re-tuned the skills. They even put a cap on how much experience you could gain in ceertain areas to try and curb power-levelling. All this did was make only a handful of character builds viable, and only with the perfect set of equipment. this means high level items being abandoned and worthless. Players being ruthless in trades, only accepting the perfect item for what thewy had, even turning down entire pages of unique gear in return for a single piece of equipment.
Finally, the largest problem, is the lack of a sufficently entertaining end-game once you do manage to become powerful enough to survive. There are no official guilds or guildhalls. Guilds consist of groups of players who stand around expecting free handouts and PKing each-other on the act 1 map. If you're not into PKing clones of the same character over and over because everyone uses the same build, and you've already maxed out your character, your only options are to start a new character, or do magic-finding runs, which consist of loading up on gear that adds to your "Magic-Find", a stat that increases the rarity and drop chance of your loot and storming through high-level areas hoping for something good to drop for one of your other characters or one of the few items you can trade for something you need.
Now I know what you're all thinking. If this game is so bad, why did you rate it so high? Wel, that's because when played as it was meant to be, this game is incredibly addictive. I've created, re-created, and built many characters. I have no idea why it's so addictive to keep playing through the same thing over and over, but it is, and many people seem to agree with me. There's just something to be said for hacking through screens full of demons and monsters, and the random level generator makes sure the labyrinths are never the same twice.
I definately reccomend this game as a single player experience. I even reccomend playing through with your buddies, but the competative online play is so horribleymessed up that it only ruins an otherwise incredible gaming experience.