That was the design choice that I hated most - and what ultimately made me enjoy the game far less (and spend less time with it) than Diablo 1. I never had an interest in the multiplayer aspect, and loved that Diablo 1 single player fairly much was a bit of senseless fun that you could drop in and out off quickly.

With the changes in Diablo 2 and the size of the individual maps that reset with each re-load that aspect was just gone. You had to finish a segment within one gaming session if you didn't want to explore and make your way through it again for the next, from the very start, hoping you'd be able to invest enough time to make it all the way. I.e. with that switch they changed the game from a nice little diversion to something that was an annoying time drain that forced you to play on even if you'd preferred not to.

Sadly, from what I hear, Diablo 3 isn't going back to persistent worlds (and if only for single player) either.

Well, it's currently installed on two computers - on my netbook, I'm playing a necromancer named Leechcroft, currently speciailzed for summoning. (I say specialized, but he's only level four, so he's just got a couple of skeletons chasing him around).

As for my main gaming computer, I kept getting interrupted and delayed last night, so I haven't actually settled on a character, although I'll probably just keep playing with the Paladin I was using to test.

very nice i just logged into b net and tried out a game, wow this game wont ever die lol
here are some images played as the amazon

Picked a character and started playing - I think I'm level five now, already done with the first quest. I'm playing a Druid, working towards Werebear, with lots of strength and vitality. I also have collected self-repairing armor for almost every slot, which is a weird feature to have in a game. I'm not complaining, though, this early in the game saving the money is awesome!

remember you can always go back to the cave and kill Corpsefire the zombie for better loot drops, the same goes for any place and any monster you can always go back and kill them each time you reload the game

Oh interesting - Titan Quest totally ripped that off :D

Thanks for the tip!

The simplest way of fixing that is my closing explorer and simply running the game from task manager. Alternatively, you can make a little .bat file that will kill explorer, launch the game and relaunch explorer once you close the game.

Yes, I recall Pindlebot, what a joy that made Battle.net of yore:(
Except in TQ it was fun to do.

thats real strange if you are level 6 and have completed quest 1 you should have a total of 7 skill points, and wearbear does not need any pre skills too please post a pic of your char skill ladder
@orc
well everyone can agree the bots ruined the game but i never cared about the bot, the game still is awesome if you can find legit players and play legit they are always waiting see the pics i posted i played with real players and had great fun but of course the crappy bots can level you up much faster but i dont care about them at all, btw there is going to be a ladder reset this 29th