Because they are disgusting creatures.

No!!! The game is a bug ridden mess and is a waste of your money. I made the mistake of buying it day 1. It was so bad that the servers shut down a little after a year of the games launch.

i liked the summoner. but it stopped being fun after a couple of hours. still, i don't think it's as terrible a game as most people think.

I knew a guy who pre-ordered the collector edition or something like that for the priviledge of paying a large sum of money to get lifetime subscription. I still laugh when I think of him.

ouch, there was a lifetime plan? poor customers...

Yes but if I remember correctly it was only for a number of people who pre-ordered the game. It gave them the right to pay around 150 $ for lifetime subscription.
Hahaha, shameless display of schadenfreude.

Hellgate had a lot of promise, but failed to deliver. There are a few neat areas, but it's highly repetitive.
I slogged through the SP game, starting on the day the servers closed down (The PC I had during he MP era was too slow to run it decent). Took a long time, and I was not keen to try on difficulty-2.

Terrible game. Terrible shooter. Weak RPG elements. It is the most godawful repetitive shooter/hack 'n slash I've ever played, which is a shame because both monster designs in the game are pretty cool. Too bad they stopped there. I love Diablo 2 and Phantom Dust (which the in between mission scenes and single-player that's designed as an intro to multiplayer are mildly reminiscent of), so I'm not averse to that kind of gameplay, but the game flat out sucks. It plays like an aborted MMO.
For an open-ended sci-fi shooter with RPG elements somewhat like what Borderlands is anticipated to be you may want to try STALKER (it's a really good game if your machine can run it), Farcry (phenomenal sandbox shooter game, but no RPG elements) or even the somewhat less notable Boiling Point (very buggy, but if they patched it by now, it'd be a pretty decent game - heavy RPG elements for a shooter). They're not straight up shmups though, so you can't just run around shooting everything.
All those games I mentioned are probably going to be available for <$14.

Diablo 2 and the Expansion can still be found for $40 retail and blizzards store (cheaper online of course) and Stalker is $20 on retail along with steam and impulse. Hope that helps anyone looking for them.

You can get BP for $9.90 at gogamer and I've seen it for as little as $3 elsewehere. Ditto on Farcry, it generally retails for $9.99 and is available in a jewel case re-release (Bestbuy, target etc). I've seen STALKER on the clearance rack of my local game store and at Target, but it's mostly out of print, thouh maybe they have a gold edition with the expansion or something, I haven't checked. I paid $9 for it a while ago. Gogamer has it for $9.90.
Diablo 2 still has a thriving online community and probably will at least until Diablo 3. $40 for that game, its expansion and that huge hint book in the treasure box or whatever it's called is a steal.

It may be thriving, but the population of battle.net is the oozing sludge you start digging up after you've worn a hole through the bottom of the barrel. I don't recommend interacting with that community. I certainly never will again.

That certainly true for the vast majority but you can find cool little communitys among the toxic waste that is battle.net if you look hard enough. I played diablo 2 hardcore for a while, the majority of that community are fairly cool at least the guys from the UK I used to play with.

It's worth mentioning that one of the best guilds I've been in was a Diablo 1 guild.
Still, the biggest reason I stopped playing battle.net games was the abominable quality of the other players.

BP's not as bad as the reviews state (it has a steep learning curve and the first hour is terrible which is where most reveiwers stopped playing), but otherwise they're mostly accurate. It actually does open-ended modern RPG pretty well (IMO, the game kind of plays like an archer in Elder Scrolls except not as deep and with vehicles). It doesn't do shooter as well. It is bugged to hell too. Personally, I like it (and from a design standpoint, conceptually it's brilliant in its integration of FPS, FPRPG, and GTA-style sandbox games), but I can only make a highly qualified recommendation based on the amount of issues the game has. Save early, save often.
You may still want to buy it. I wouldn't spend more than $10 though. 50/50 you might hate it. I don't know anyone who loves it, either. Its main problem was that it was a game that lacked the graphical technology to adequately support it on PCs when it was released (e.g. Nocturne, Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines). It wasn't coded particularly well, either and poor sales led to a lack of updates (a la Temple of Elemental Evil, Anachronox, the already mentioned VtM:B, Arcanum, Daggerfall). It may fare better today if some dedicated fans updated the patches on their own. I doubt it though. It never had a rabid fanbase. It did have a really cool theme song, though.
Have you played Vampire:the Masquerade Bloodlines? That's a great FP CRPG set in the modern era (now that's it's all patched up and PCs are faster). You can play it using firearms, too if you want.