Posted March 11, 2019
advowson: Then it's a good thing this isn't an in-game issue, but an in-chat one. ;)
To be a bit more serious - if I were assigned to work on this, my first step would be to try to determine whether (a) the client is incorrectly sending level 1/warrior to the server, which then faithfully parrots back the bad data or (b) the client sends your true level/class, and the server wrongly sends out level 1/warrior instead of the real data. This will tell the developer whether to fix the client code or the server code. The easiest way to test this, assuming they didn't rewrite their battle.net chat protocol, would be to find someone who has Diablo from an original disc (patched up to v1.09) and have that person modify their registry to join the new "Global" battle.net server. We know that disc Diablo did the right thing with regard to statistics in chat, so if that person is also impacted, that says the server is broken. If that person does not experience the bug, then the new GOG Diablo client is broken. (We could also try to find/host a private battle.net like server, or monitor the traffic sent between the client and server, but both of those are much more advanced topics and might cross into the areas Blizzard doesn't want people exploring. Differential analysis of the disc Diablo client should be perfectly within the license agreements though.)
That tells which component needs attention. Going deeper would be a task for a Blizzard developer, since they should (but apparently don't :)) have the tools to trace the bad component to see where it first goes wrong.
I do still have a disc copy I could try to swap out the bnet components on and see if the server works properly, it's not really a registry thing it's more of a dll thing to swap gateways. Did that a few times to play on private servers for D2 back when botting was so bad on bnet you couldn't even log on without getting spammed. I have a weird feeling that I won't be allowed to connect but it's worth a shot I suppose. To be a bit more serious - if I were assigned to work on this, my first step would be to try to determine whether (a) the client is incorrectly sending level 1/warrior to the server, which then faithfully parrots back the bad data or (b) the client sends your true level/class, and the server wrongly sends out level 1/warrior instead of the real data. This will tell the developer whether to fix the client code or the server code. The easiest way to test this, assuming they didn't rewrite their battle.net chat protocol, would be to find someone who has Diablo from an original disc (patched up to v1.09) and have that person modify their registry to join the new "Global" battle.net server. We know that disc Diablo did the right thing with regard to statistics in chat, so if that person is also impacted, that says the server is broken. If that person does not experience the bug, then the new GOG Diablo client is broken. (We could also try to find/host a private battle.net like server, or monitor the traffic sent between the client and server, but both of those are much more advanced topics and might cross into the areas Blizzard doesn't want people exploring. Differential analysis of the disc Diablo client should be perfectly within the license agreements though.)
That tells which component needs attention. Going deeper would be a task for a Blizzard developer, since they should (but apparently don't :)) have the tools to trace the bad component to see where it first goes wrong.
EDIT: Okay so good news and bad news, good news is the original game can see the new bnet gateway. Bad news is they modified the battle(dot)snp file from the original game soooo I have to reinstall the gog version, copy that over and try to connect again since the server will not allow me to download the "update" and patch it. I'll post another update here on how it went after this is done downloading.
EDIT 2: Okay so after fiddling around with gateways and updating to 1.09 from the update on blizzards website it's still asking me to update the game so, I copied over the battle(dot)snp and the cache file to wind up with the game crashing as soon as bnet tries to load meaning they altered some of the underlying code for the game already which would make sense with the whole bug fixes they supposedly did. What I don't get is why they didn't change the version number if the changes are that vast so unfortunately I cannot test this with an old disc copy of the game. Either we wait for a fix or play over hamachi at this point which really sucks because I don't really want to rely on a third party service to play this game online when they went through the trouble of updating the bnet server. Granted yes, the server doesn't exactly work like it should but they are well aware of the issue now at least. Now to play the waiting game? At least I have Belzebub/Tchernobog to hold me over for now :\
Post edited March 11, 2019 by Halted