Single player:
I dont see the advantages points for playing this game in multiplayer.
You can join another person game and kill things to get “players 2” loot.
Shared loot in public games (…)
You forgot ladder items are now accessible to SP. But keep in mind that way before D2R we already enjoyed /players x. And static maps were always a thing in SP.
These are all great things. There is no reason why SPers can’t enjoy the game fully and take the most benefit from it they can. No access to ladder items and events was always extremely unfair to the (also vibrant *) SP community. And with the introduction of the /players command, some of the ladder rune words and quest rewards became more import to SP. We would have to mod the game to gain access to them. Not cool.
Reasons to play online Diablo II are now:
Not too shabby. Have fun.
(*) We actually had a pretty good idea of the considerable size of the Diablo II SP community, because of the SP trading forums online.
Well playing online makes the game Easy mode, if you are prepared to trade and group. You can trade for BiS for your build and group up whenever you hit a wall to blast past it. So there’s that.
If you play offline (or online but SSF) then you only have what you find, and have to handle everything alone, so it’s much much more challenging. A completely different game really.
When they finally add ladder, I hope it is SSF, because a ladder where you can freely trade with other ladder players (including for cash money) is somewhat meaningless as the game simply becomes p2win.
No personal loot is the single issue that kills multiplayer for me completely. More loot dropping in MP is a zero-sum game if it always ends up in the bag of the most selfish player in your group.
As things are, I only use mp to rush through normal on characters I already have gear for.
If it wasn’t for the necessity of trade at endgame I’d probably play Offline exclusively. So yeah, I don’t really see the point in MP either other than rushing through the acts.
Pvp and talking to others are the only real reasons to play multiplayer for me.
I’m really upset they removed the ability to make LAN connections over the internet with something like Hamachi so you could play SP with your friend/s. Like you note, SP is the superior version of the game.
Im moving over to sp just to pick up rune drops. Once anything drops in a mp game I am not even able to see what drops before all good things are visible to me.
Today I got a ranged group kill drop vex rune. My first highrune I saw ever in mp d2. I ran towards it but sorc posted out of nowhere and picked it up.
Being able to find hr myself woth the /player setting deals with so much. And I dont mind the hame to be more challenging as long as I can find what I want myself. In all the years of d2 and d2r never made a hr runeword myself.