Originally posted by: ConstipatedVigilante
Originally posted by: invidia
Why are people comparing this as a time sink like WoW? You can hit high 80s within 2 days if you're doing things right. You can get geared in a week, without putting in 14 hours a day.
What's the fun of the game if you're power leveling? And my god man, how would you get to 80 in 2 days? Level speed is pretty much proportional to how much time you put in.
The thing is Diablo II's addictiveness does not reside in leveling, however slow or fast, legitimately or not one can or want to do it. It's much more complex and deeper than that. That game is a gambling game with monsters and a nice little story behind it, it's addictive as long as you just start it up and play, it's as difficult to explain and justify as it is for a person who's dependent on alcohol and cigarettes even if the technical/medical/chemical/physical reasons behind it are clear.
It's good to know that many players can control themselves and that many others did get bored with Diablo II eventually, but it is also a potential danger to anyone's social life and as I said I am not joking about this. I myself have been trapped in a "playing, stopping, restarting" loop about four or five times, and each times I stopped (until the last one, so far) were because I thought that because I knew everything about the game, because I had tried every items possible in single-player, that I would get bored of it, but when I logged-on Battle.Net again to play, it all started again, and in the back of my mind there's myself asking to me "why in the great heck am I still playing this".
That is called an obsession, and D2 can be like that for certain players. I don't want to make a dramatization, but facts are what they are, it's been known, observed and I am (or was) not alone in that boat. So, no, it's not just about leveling, I kept seeing many players around with two, three or more accounts, all of them full (8 characters each) of level 90+ characters, some at levels 97 or so, equipped with all of the best items, used under the very best character builds you could wish to glance even just a second over, and those players keep playing still today. Some of them don't "play" at all since all of the work is being done by bots while they're at school/job/boning their girlfriend, indeed, but there is still such hardcore players doing everything legitimately and often alone, even when playing on-line.
If D2 is just a hobby, entertainment, I have no problems with that, but when someone starts missing classes, or calling at the job because they've suddenly got a "cold" when yesterday they could have flown with Superman just to play D2 instead is exactly when that person needs to ask a few questions and try to reason with him/herself.
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