Re: Why do you play Single Player?
Long ago, when I first got D2, I played single player for my first couple of chars beacuse I wanted to know what I was doing before going online.
But I felt invested in those characters so I only went to open battle.net, where I found that trading was a travesty of cheating. (someone traded me forstburns for a p gem, I presume because it was duped). So I lost interest.
But some friend at work convinced me to restart on bnet, because bliz enforced the rules on the servers so it was legit. They played HC, which was a huge step for me to get used to, but it made even normal Andarial an adreneline rush.
Played HC on bnet for months and months. Had a WW barb die in normal cows to Black Wall of Doom. Had 2 necros die in Hell Arcane sanct, and 1 die in NM arcane sanct, all 3 trapped by my minions (this was before you could move past your minions) Lost like 5 sorcs to various lag, including one in act 1 hell, entering the barracks, when the necro I was teamed with Save/Exit out because of the lagspike, so everything decended on my little sorc.
The crowd I played with, switched games to Everquest, and so did I. Quite fun for a long time.
I came back to D2 on bnet for D2X, but it wasn't the same. At that point, d2 classic had decended into just endless cow runs, and d2x was constantly doing bloody foothills runs, or whatever. And lots of lvl 20 ppl begging for you to power them past the ancients.
Meanwhile, the dup hacks were getting worse and worse. Between the hacks and the lag, I just didn't want to deal with playing HC online anymore.
So I started to play offline. But I quickly didn't like it. Online, since I played with a coop group, it was easy to xfer items and to store them on mule characters.
offline, I couldn't save anything. Very frustrating. Plus, I was used to my HC characters having a pretty decent chance that if they died, someone in the group would be able to loot my items for me, and I'd get them back.
So, to deal with the item problem, I started making non-HC chars, but if they died, I would load them up to xfer their items to a new char, and then I deleted the dead guy. But even that was hard because I had to arrange with my bro to be able to xfer items.
I was getting ready to just give up and quit D2 for good, when I found the SPF. I was looking for a utility which would let me store items. All I could find was "cheat" utilities which would let me edit my character. I didn't want those, I just wanted my sorc to be able to find a nice sword for my barb, or my barb find a nice wand for my necro, or my necro to find a nice shield for my pally, etc.
Well, I found the SPF (kinda funny, the original coop HC group on bnet had used purediablo.com's forums) and found Atma. ATMA saved me. Without atma, I would have just been too frustrated at seeing a great sorc item drop for my necro, but know that my brother was getting tired of helping me xfer items.
In the end, with the SPF, I found a helpful community of legit players.
Suprisingly, offline play, once considered the haven for cheaters, is where I found the most legit players. Players who are legit not because Bliz will ban them if they aren't, but players who are legit because they hold themselves to high standards.
So, to answer your question: Why do I play single player?
-- to avoid lag, to be legit, to know that I passed all the obstacles solo, to not worry if my play schedule doesn't fit my friend's schedule, and to have fun.
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