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Hello TeamLiquid!
I wanted to share my memories of Diablo 2 and what it was to me.
I first played diablo 2 alone, i started a Necro. I played the game on battle.net and i would join games with random people to help kill bosses. I loved the game and i loved corpse explosion. I was 14 when i first started. At school i overheard kids in my grade talking about diablo 2. They already had a character or 2 at high enough level to rush you to hell. This is back in 1.09 diablo, there was no enigma rune word, and shit like that, so you had to have a Sorc rush you for speed cuz of teleport. So i ended up getting my necro up to hell and high level via Hell Cows (Dopest shit ever). Then i realized my necro was no good, playing the game straight through does not = efficiant points being put into your stats perfectly with your end gear in mind, so you waste alot of skill points. Also there were no links to spells in 1.09, meaning ice bolt would not give bonus to frozen orb like in 1.10. Anyways i then created a Sorc for Magic find, i had my friends rush him to hell cows. so by level 7 you are in hell cows, going up 5 levels a game or whatever. Before you know it you are in your 70's and can start doing Meph runs to find better gear. Now in 1.09 Diablos 2's economy worked as such, SOJ's were your currency, not in game gold, or runes. Every good item had an SOJ worth. Unidentified items were worth more as well, because i guess the rumor was those couldnt be Duped, and also the chance of a perfect is always appealing. So to get your first SOJ was always a pain, you had to collect 40 Chipped Gems, for 1 SOJ, or rush someone to Hell for 1 soj. After you started to get a few, you could then start working the economy, buy a Shako for 4 soj's and sell it for 5. Its funny how you traded in diablo 2, you would make game names with your item you wanted to sell. You could also spam in trade channel. Now, me and my friends started doing meph runs and getting richer and richer. Soon our characters were ok geared. We then discovered Bots. The idea of having the video game play for us everynight and automaticly kill Meph or Pindle and pick up items was amazing. I then went out to learn. i got my first bot up quickly, it was a pindlebot. Now pindle was good for those really hard items, he could drop everything in the game, but it was super rare. On my frist night of running the bot, i woke up in the morning, and ran to my computer, i saw a Unique Unid Hydra Bow..... i was speechless a WindForce in my inventory.... wow
That was 40 Soj's worth right there, without having to play at all! Every morning me and my friends would meet before homeroom freshman year, and talk about what we found, or what new char we were making, or what new items we traded for, or anything diablo 2 related. I then ran pindlebot everynight for a few weeks. No more hydra bows were found....  its very rare. Now one of my friends started to run a mephisto bot. This gave him constant loot of items worth 5-15 soj;s everynight. So in a week, it would actually give you more then pindlebots big ticket items. We all switched to mephisto bots. When we would get home from school, we didnt play the game that much anymore, we had to spend our time, making games, and hitting up the trade channels, to seel our items and convert them to SOJ's. Now that we were loaded and had mule characters filled with soj's we then discovered there were bugged items starting to come, these items were Called ITH's
Iths were so strong, you had to have them, they were worth about 40 soj's. There were also Bugged Valors at this point, which were worth like 3 UNID windoforces. There were bugged strings. and Occy Rings and all sorts of bad ass items.
we treated them as if they were legit items, meaning they were just more powerful then legit items, but the price made them ok cuz you had to spend time to get the money to have them, plus other people had them, and you didnt want to get raped. Now at this point me and my friends were as rich as anyone in the game, having 100's of soj's worth of items. What came next was when i became a bad person in diablo 2.....
Trade hacking.
Trade hacking had just come out, now what it would do is put an image of an item in the trade window and the other player would put stuff in the trade menu hit the green check and he got nothing...
How you had to do it was creative.
You would have 2 people in the game, with similar names, like creativename and creatlvename
just replace i with l or something. 1 person hides outside of town, now the other goes up to the players and initiates the trade. You then run a program which droped that player, but while a trade menu is up the other player runs right next to them, so when he drops, its like you just closed the trade menu. you say oh sorry lag or something and open the trade menu up and you cant see if it worked but you would see him load up his trade menu, and then the green check would go on and you had nothing in it... it felt awesome, the reactions peoplle would have after having something they worked hard to get, get taken from them caused newb rage. we would /ignore and be on our way. We were young and didnt care. Now after doing this for a while we then became too rich, it was stupid. we didnt need to do it anymore but we did.
next came duping.
duping had existed but never effected the economy. It was in a closed group i guess..
but 1 method became mainstream
this caused a flood of bugged valors or any item you could imagine, this killed the economy and the game i loved...
a month later april 1st hit, and all of our accounts were banned...
did we desever it.. you betchya, was i sad... terribly.
we never played again as the economy was still broken and nothin appealed...
i remember diablo 2 for botting and trade hacking... and map hack was a given.
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Papua New Guinea1054 Posts
I was playing d2 on closed bnet ever since the expansion hit the shelfs all the way up to 1.10, when the game died for me. I remember having all the regular caracters at 99 with endgame gear, such times. And yea, duping and hack items were kinds silly - remember having ITH bows, bugged windforce, bugged tal armor, bugged chako, bugged occy, fucking wizard ring, occy ring, constrictor ring, shit was dope as hell.
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I loved the jewels, Jagged jewel of shout and havoc jewel?
bugged jewels were worth alot 
Constrictor ring was OP
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I love game economics! When a dupe happens on a massive scale, it's as if a meteorite crashed into earth containing tons and tons of gold and precious stones effectively sending the market into cardiac arrest.
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Awww man.... thank you SO much for reminding me of all this. awesome memories of slowly building up a character til it could run people through hell mode. doing hell runs for SoJ's ALLLL night.
You'd get some really lazy guy who'd message you "Alright run me through norm, nightmare, AND hell and ill give you X amount of SoJ's.... hours later... you're finally done and the tension builds where you're wondering if this fucker is actually going to pay up. ahhh incredible. i eventually got wiser -- demanded to see the sojs and made em pay ahead of time / in increments. to be honest there may NEVER be such a goofy and awesome system in any game ever again O . O
also (i think) 1.09 was the patch where bow amazons / Windforce were incredibly strong and i had a near perfect one at some point x )
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So you're one of the guys that ruined the game for me. Thanks a lot.
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Man I was like 9 when I remember the hell cow leveling. It was so hilarious and I was always so amused by gold so I'd run in pick up greys and whites and whatnot run out sell and run back in get some exp and repeat. Everytime someone touched the Cow King I'd instantly quit, oh man good times.
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First time I played I also picked a necro first.
I had no idea what I was doing,only thing I knew is that I like skeletons and Cs so I put everyone of my skill points into skeleton mastery/raise skeleton and cs.
Turns I accidentally built a Fishymancer the most broken thing in the game(and kinda boring,at least for pve).
Later on I noticed that you don't really need any gear for that build to work rofl.
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I remember when bloodruns were the way to level up. I also remember when what seemed like overnight people didn't want to trade in SOJs anymore because they were duped. Well no shit they were duped but they were duped before when you were trading with them so why the sudden change? Ah people on that game were generally stupid, naive, young kids.
So much fun trading and leveling and getting all the sweet gear though. I remember once my friend gave me a windforce and it was like the happiest day of my life until that point. That game really did suck your soul.
I still play from time to time but I try not to get caught up in the whole trade/get good as fast as possible thing because it eats away your time, I just play for a bit of fun with my friends and bros.
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It's pretty interesting how everyone's string of experiences are so similar on D2.
I started playing in 1.08 and went through the same string of experiences, except even worse.
I got hacked by Mouse (by using his Maphack), and he actually hooked me up with everything you needed to be a "bad" D2 player: Trading hacks, Duping programs (without flooding the server, just pressing a button), etc.
Luckily, I got out of that stage quick. It got boring have every possible character in the game and entire accounts full of mules with SoJs.
So I started trying to do more challenging things, like fighting Uber Diablo and Uber Tristram in the quickest time possible.
Hunting Uber Diablo added an entirely new aspect, it was so fun. I forget the name of the website now, but (recalling from memory, I'm not sure if this is 100% accurate anymore) basically, Uber Diablo showed up after 100 SoJs were sold to NPC Merchants on a server. Blizzard had like 100 servers, so the website had a tracker (which wasn't 100% accurate) and you had to have a program that would tell you which server you were on. The website would label which servers were hot (close to 100 SoJs sold), so you had to keep re-logging in until you were on that server. Then you would either create/join a game and sell some SoJs and hope that Uber Diablo popped up. Then you would have to hunt for him in the game. He usually showed up in ACT I near the Cairne Stones.
I was always at the edge of my seat, hoping to see the words pop up on screen "Diablo walks the earth..." Or the big disappointment when you would join a game and everyone would say in all-chat, too late, he's dead. He would drop what's called the Annihilus, which was a small charm that gave +1 to all skills, and +10-20 (random) to all attributes. You could only have one per character. It was cool, but I had one on every champ. It was just more fun hunting Uber Diablo.
I'll never forget, my most fun experience in D2 ever involved Uber Diablo. I was hunting him, and got lucky. As soon as I got on the server, and created the game, I saw "Diablo walks the earth..." Then I see:
".... has joined the game"
".... has joined the game"
".... has joined the game
etc.
The name of my game was like "ACT I help", so when I saw they were all level 80+ I knew what they were all after. Every body auto-hostiled each other and the mad race to the Cairne Stones Waypoint started. I got lucky and since I was there first, I was waiting at the other end of the waypoint spamming hammers (Hammerdin) on whomever unlucky fella decided to use the waypoint to get there. I kill like 2 or 3 people who were stupid enough to do that. Some got smart and just took the long way there. So, basically began the epic battle of 8 high-level fully-geared Characters duking it out and trying to kill Uber Diablo (who wasn't easy to kill alone) at the same time. You can imagine all the dead bodies in that area, lol.
The kicker, for me anyways: I already had an Anni on my Hammerdin, so in the middle of all the fighting, I took the waypoint to some random place in ACT 2, and dropped my Anni. I managed to kill everyone AND Uber Diablo, picked up THAT Anni, and made them all think I won it. I somehow managed to NOT die in the middle of all this fighting, drop off my Ani, kill Uber Diablo and everyone else, all while trying to call my little brother to get to get online. They all left, and my little brother got on to pick up my other Anni (obviously, I told him were it was).
I have no idea why everyone joined my game instead of creating my own. But it was pretty crazy to see so many Uber Diablo hunters in one game. Pretty rare anyways.
It was so Epic, to me It'd be pretty cool to see if someone else had a similar experience.
Man great times. It makes me want to re-install and play lol.
Long post, I know. Sorry to hijack your thread
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On October 19 2011 06:51 Wohmfg wrote:
I remember when bloodruns were the way to level up. I also remember when what seemed like overnight people didn't want to trade in SOJs anymore because they were duped. Well no shit they were duped but they were duped before when you were trading with them so why the sudden change? Ah people on that game were generally stupid, naive, young kids.
So much fun trading and leveling and getting all the sweet gear though. I remember once my friend gave me a windforce and it was like the happiest day of my life until that point. That game really did suck your soul.
I still play from time to time but I try not to get caught up in the whole trade/get good as fast as possible thing because it eats away your time, I just play for a bit of fun with my friends and bros.
The reason why people kept changing their stance over duped items was due to how Blizzard dealt with dupes.
There are a lot of varying explanations for how Blizzard dealt with dupes, but I never found a solid explanation. People even came up with all kinds of ways to ensure something wasn't duped, which I think was all garbage.
Supposedly, Blizzard had a program (Stormwind or something?) that ran checks on dupes and deleted them as necessary. Some have explained it that if the program find two items in the same game with the same ID (Blizzard had a unique ID for every item) it would delete them. This did make sense since some people would join games and go "WTF where's my String of Ears?" and someone would go "mine is missing too." But, I had entire mules worth of 100% duped SoJs and only some of them would be deleted.
Based on the majority of the people's experiences with duped items usually determined the masses' stance in trade.
If you were really good you could even tell what versions of the item were duped. For example, some items had variable statistics, like the Anni I described in my previous post. Most people didn't want a perfect Anni since it was most susceptible to duping.
Then some people got smart and wanted Unidentified items since supposedly Battle.net didn't assign item IDs before the item was Identified. So even if the UNID'ed item was duped twice , both would get a different item ID once it was ID'ed.
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I remember when I first started playing D2, I rolled a necro and buffed his strength haha. I had a bunch of skeletons and would walk around with heavy armor and a sword.... Didn't really know what i was doing.
After the noob times I have to say that I've spent most of my time in this game playing hardcore mode. I've had some tough losses (mid 60's wolf druid with very good gear waiting for him x.x), but I really enjoyed the intensity of hardcore. Between PKers hunting you down and some really messed up unique monster spawns you never really knew what to expect, so it was really exciting.
The best character I ever managed was an 83 fire druid, but when he got to Hell he always needed to be in a party (thanks fire immunes) and my friend's character died in Act 2 Hell which sort of got him a bit discouraged 
After that I started a trapsin, got her to 77, and realized along the way that the fire druid was considerably less efficient way to play haha. You can still learn things from this real old game, which is why D2 was so great.
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I didn't play Hardcore because it was already hard enough to deal with all the "Immune to Physical" + "Immune to Fire" + "Immune to Cold" monsters lololol. Like if you're a Cold or Fire Sorc, you're pretty much screwed. Spec'ing in two different trees made you so inefficient in this patch cause of Synergies and buffed monsters, too.
I remember playing as a Barb, I would have to use Berserk on those, leaving you with 0 Armor. Then all the sudden something random would come at you and smack you twice and you die.
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I remember how sad I was to lose my only Hardcore char (a sorc)
First time Baal and got owned by ghosts which spammed lightning bolts like mad.
It went so fast
Never tried to level up another Hardcore character after that :p
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On October 19 2011 07:14 jacosajh wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2011 06:51 Wohmfg wrote:
I remember when bloodruns were the way to level up. I also remember when what seemed like overnight people didn't want to trade in SOJs anymore because they were duped. Well no shit they were duped but they were duped before when you were trading with them so why the sudden change? Ah people on that game were generally stupid, naive, young kids.
So much fun trading and leveling and getting all the sweet gear though. I remember once my friend gave me a windforce and it was like the happiest day of my life until that point. That game really did suck your soul.
I still play from time to time but I try not to get caught up in the whole trade/get good as fast as possible thing because it eats away your time, I just play for a bit of fun with my friends and bros. The reason why people kept changing their stance over duped items was due to how Blizzard dealt with dupes. There are a lot of varying explanations for how Blizzard dealt with dupes, but I never found a solid explanation. People even came up with all kinds of ways to ensure something wasn't duped, which I think was all garbage. Supposedly, Blizzard had a program (Stormwind or something?) that ran checks on dupes and deleted them as necessary. Some have explained it that if the program find two items in the same game with the same ID (Blizzard had a unique ID for every item) it would delete them. This did make sense since some people would join games and go "WTF where's my String of Ears?" and someone would go "mine is missing too." But, I had entire mules worth of 100% duped SoJs and only some of them would be deleted. Based on the majority of the people's experiences with duped items usually determined the masses' stance in trade. If you were really good you could even tell what versions of the item were duped. For example, some items had variable statistics, like the Anni I described in my previous post. Most people didn't want a perfect Anni since it was most susceptible to duping. Then some people got smart and wanted Unidentified items since supposedly Battle.net didn't assign item IDs before the item was Identified. So even if the UNID'ed item was duped twice , both would get a different item ID once it was ID'ed.
No that's my point it was just SOJs that people didn't want to trade. :/
It was just as I managed to get about 40 as well and they became almost worthless lol.
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I wonder if this will jog anyone's memories...
"Realm Down"
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Aaah, Diablo 2... I must have spent 2000 hours on that game. During school, my usual routine would be to come home at 2 and play until 10. I ended up in an Italian clan, which greatly improved my skills with that language. Over the years, I must have accumulated a few dozen characters around level 80. My highest ever was 84 I think. I always lost interest at some point since there wasn't much growth and change after having beaten hell difficulty, but always returned to start a new character after some pause. Oh, how many characters I have lost to the 3 months inactivity rule! I have always remained legit, which seems to be rather rare looking at this thread.
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On October 19 2011 07:59 iamke55 wrote:
I wonder if this will jog anyone's memories...
"Realm Down"
The bane of my childhood.
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i remember all this.
Except I played hardcore, and we didn't have most of those bugged items.
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EPT
