Plus it was so laggy compared to playing LAN games over TCP/IP with my friends. We only played Hardcore characters, so when we played on Battle net briefly, it was a terrible experience compared to open characters we played amongst one another.
And yeah, we would start playing Diablo 2 in bursts. Play intensely for a couple of months, put it down for a few months, then start up again for a few months, etc. Having Battle net delete those characters would have been terrible.
I know right, you can donate blood plasma and get paid for it. What a novelty.
No, I think that was more an “are you OK?” sort of response.
I figured we all assumed we were talking about the direct connection option, for which IIRC the menu selection was TCP/IP.
Anyway!
Yes, Open Bnet was trash. Closed was for sure the only way to go.
You’ve never encountered the principle of comedic exaggeration?
I have, but not being aware of the three month thing, it didn’t come across.
Three months is really short. Should be at least a year. But I guess they only nuke your character if it’s been over 3 months and someone else tries to make a new character with the same name, so if you managed to get “DrizztzBallz” you need to login to the game to defend him.
IIRC it was just the inactivity, I don’t recall any name-collision piece there and I had several characters deleted from Closed BNet back in the day.
I just looked it up, but that random forum post could have been wrong, I suppose.
I donate plasma a few times a week, and get about $90-120 (depending on promotions) per week. It’s about 2 hours of my time (during which I watch shows on my phone or read on the Kindle app, stuff I’d be doing anyway in other words) and I use that money to buy fun stuff like Magic cards, video games, or Apple Watches. :)
Between “random forum post” and “my memory from 22 years and a lot of livin’ ago” I choose…neither? Heh.
I have no idea what the period of inactivity was, just that I don’t play these games constantly and every time I tried to do a character on bnet I’d come back to the game after some period of doing other stuff and find them gone, so after the second or third time I just gave up and never tried closed again.
You can get early access beta for D2 without having to preorder the game. Link your Twitch account to Blizzard, and then pick one of the Twitch D2 streams that have “drops enabled” and let it run for 2.5 hours.
Weird ‘watch this ad for 2.5 hours and you get free shit’ thing they got going(mobile inspired perhaps?).
Twitch Drops aren’t a Blizzard thing, they’re a Twitch thing, and tons of games use them to incentivize people to watch streamers streaming their games.
Nah.
If it was just “go to a twitch stream while linked”, maybe I’d check it out.
I mean if you’re really interested all you have to do is open a twitch stream in a browser tab and leave it there for a couple hours unattended.
Yes, absolutely, that is what I’m not doing. Too much friction for something I don’t care about. If it was Diablo 4, maybe.
Yeah for these things I just set the stream’s volume to really low (a friend said that muting might possibly invalidate twitch drops), drop it to the lowest video quality, and move the browser window off the screen and let it run while I’m doing other stuff.
muting absolutely does not invalidate the drops, as i muted the channel before going to work out. When i came back, hello diablo 2 beta!
And thanks for linking the drop information - i was on the fence about purchasing this (i didn’t like d2, enjoyed it when the expansion came out, but not to the extent most other people did), and this will likely help me decide whether there’s something here for me or whether it’s just a nostalgia rush…
Holy crap Reign of Terror is great