Teena, if you read this, please ask Jim to sign & send photo, thx.
Yep, I did it; I went into ALL my Diablo II accounts and refreshed them, upgraded characters, settled the contents of backpacks and stashboxes, and in some cases took the character up a level or three, to make sure I wasn’t booted out for switching games too fast, although that did happen a few times in spite of my care.
In all, I’ve rescued about a hundred D2 characters, representing some $2,000 in value of what they carry, and another several thousand hours of gameplay over the past decade or more to bring them to that level.
So, they’re all fine, all doing well, none of them lost, none at all, including my level 77 HARDCORE chars in the EUROPEAN server and another 50 HardCore chars on the EASTERN server and still more, about fifty, in the WEST server, so I’m ready when you are to do Bardo Safaris in D2, and to hand out tons of great drops to those who join safaris.
As you know from my previous blogs several years ago, I fell down and went “boom” when everyone switched over to Diablo 3, which I can’t take on any level from aesthetics to gameplay, and then with the failure of D3, which I predicted years before it was released, to that equally eye-confusing Path Of Exile.
My tired old eyes just plain can’t take the whizzy whuzzy graphics designed for the pleasure of rapidly bored teenagers and pre-teens.
After just a few minutes on that eye-popping whallopingly scuzzy and totally formless onscreen confusion they call Path of Exile, I can’t draw, paint or handle screen graphics for about half an hour, sometimes more, and it has been known to trigger an ocular migraine or two.
That’s unacceptable, and besides the graphics, I find nothing in the game that even closely resembles what I see in D2 as a training field. There are hundreds of differences in gameplay, but the major difference besides graphics is the absence of what I call “teaching lessons” contained in the game itself, not artificially imposed upon it by an outside force.
But enough about PoE. I want to talk about …
DAY OH, DAAAAAYYYYY OH, DAYLIGHT COME AND ME WANT TO GO HOME.
I’m cooking up a buncha great gamestyles and problems to overcome in Diablo 2, so you don’t have to set them up and overcome them in what is laughingly called “Real Life”.
These problems will include many interactive psycho-emotional difficulties that could interfere radically with the party’s progress, and that’s all to the good, in order to expose neurosis and neuritis and particularly neuralgia, not to mention that other thing…
Oh, yeah, a note to my Southern Cousin Amnesia — “Honey, ain’t you forgotten something???”
Another note, this time to self: “What ever happened to Arthur and Katherine Murray?”
I danced with Mrs. Murray once, when my mother brought me to their place. I was just three and a half years old at the time, it was mid-summer and Mrs. Murray showed me how to do my favorite dance, the Samba, which I liked to dance whenever Manuel deFalla’s “Ritual Dance of Fire” was played over WQXR Classical Radio in New York.
Naturally, we didn’t have a recording of that. Records at that time were limited to three minutes per side, and required a changer in order to drop each record when the previous disk had finished playing.
This meant you had a thirty-second delay between disks, during which you heard “whizz, scroing, bink, dink, thunk, clunk, scratch” and then the next three minute segment of musical information.
That ended rather slowly, with the advent of the LP or Long Play record, which was ten inches wide, not 12 as are the modern LPs which they still make, by the way, as well as 78 RPM singles, the top standard of today’s recording industry, believe it or not. Digital is garbage, as anyone in the music industry knows.
There are many lessons to be learned in Diablo 2, that are not to be found in Diablo 3 or Path of Exile, although if I were able to handle the graphics, I’m sure I’d find something of work-value, but I can’t, so I didn’t.
Claude and I did dozens of talks on the subject, and the CDs can all be ordered from the ordering thingy somewhere on one or another of our websites, I’m sure, and I’m not going to rob you of precious work you’ll be doing when you find them yourself instead of following my link to them.
Diablo 2 is an important part of our training path, and may not be around much longer; take advantage while you can of this opportunity.
I run five Bardo Safaris a week, and there are other safaris available in D2 — a women’s safari, two, maybe three noob safaris and a few Cloister-Only safaris that you might see or hear about from time to time.
We take D2 seriously, and I hope you do, too.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby