It’s that time again! On the morning of Tuesday, November 26, we’ll be conducting maintenance in order to reset the Diablo II ladder. We anticipate the realms could be down for up to six hours, and during that time all existing ladder characters will be converted to non-ladder. All characters and items being converted to non-ladder will remain intact, but once converted these characters will no longer have access to ladder content such as creating ladder-only rune words.

This ladder reset, like all those before it, creates a clean slate where all ladder characters begin at level 1 with no previous items to help them. To participate, simply wait until the Diablo II realms return to service, log in to Battle.net, and tick the “Ladder Character” checkbox when creating a new character. You can track ladder character leveling progress by clicking on the Ladder button from the main Diablo II in-game Battle.net interface.

For more information on ladder characters please visit the Arreat Summit at http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/basics/charactertypes.shtml

Check out the question and the answer below it. RPS obviously hit a sore spot with their inquiry.

RPS: What if people don’t want to commit to a community? What if they just want to play the game?

Martens: We didn’t make that game. That’s the straight-up answer. We did not make that game, and we’re not going to turn this game into that game. We have the online mode because we learned a lot over the many, many years that Diablo II was in development.

That was the wrong choice to allow people to play offline, and we still stand by that. And we think Internet access is widespread. If someone has no Internet access, then yeah, Diablo III is not the game for them.

[PR motions that time is up]

RPS: Thanks for your time.

At a panel at its BlizzCon convention in Anaheim, California, Blizzard revealed new features of Diablo 3’s Reaper of Souls expansion that heavily ramp up the randomisation of the game and remove the need for players to endlessly retread the game’s heavily scripted campaign acts.

Game director Josh Mosqueira admitted that the original game’s campaign did not sit well with the series’ tradition of randomisation, with environments that felt largely similar on subsequent play-throughs.

Not only will new campaign environments like the just-unveiled climatctic area, Pandemonium, have much more randomised layouts – where their form and the direction you take through them can be radically changed – but the game will be opened out by a new, more random way to play: Adventure mode.

To read the full article check out Eurogamer.net