Warnings are intended to keep players safe from hacks, rips offs, con artists, and even the occasional in-game danger. This section serves the same purpose as consumer information services and TV shows like Fight Back. Knowledge is power, and knowing what to watch out for and how the game actually works will keep you from running afoul of an unfortunate fate.
This page contains general purpose warnings, and some links to other pages in this section. See the Warnings Category for a full list of articles on this issue. Be sure you also check out the hacks, few of which involve actual hacking and most of which rely heavily on social engineering to work their black magic.
Open Battle.net Precautions
Whether you're playing Diablo I or Diablo II, always back up your characters (MP chars in D1, open chars in D2) before taking them online, since there are hacks galore in the unregulated world of open Battle.net. You can be killed in town, your corpse popped, or worse, and if you haven't backed up your character recently, you are out of luck and in a world of hurt. For example:
- "Yesterday I was online in open Battle.net and someone offered to trade me a Wormskull and ring of Jordan for some unique armor and a unique ring (that I found myself). I did it and then noticed that the Wormskull was glitching and was in the corner of the inventory screen. Once I left the game to try and fix it and tried to go into another room it said, BAD ITEM. So I just exited Battle.net and went to single player to look at my new items when my character was suddenly COMPLETELY ERASED except for the fact that he was still Sir (meaning I was in nightmare) and he had finished all the quests. Everything else was gone and he was restarted as a level 1 Necro. -- Mike
Backing up your characters is very easy in D2. In your Diablo II folder there is a folder called "save". In this you'll see files with your character names. The ones with .d2s extension are your character save files, you just need to copy those to another folder, and you can then restore them at any time by copying that file back to the /save folder. Be sure you don't overwrite a more recent version of your character by accident, and make frequent back ups so you don't lose play time or items if you have to restore.
More tips on backing up, muling items, and other single player issues can be seen in our Single Player FAQ.