Quote:
Originally Posted by
whnay. 
Can someone explain to me the allure of hardcore?
Never really felt the urge to in D2...but permanent death is kind of a cool feature. Obviously not something you could sell to the gaming population as a whole (no new MMO would have a chance of getting critical mass of customers with perma-death...but some old ones did) but its a cool feature. You screw up, you start over.
Only problem is that you also have to start over when the server glitches or you get some bad lag or when they ninja-nerf you skill combo and you end up thinking you are safe and getting raped by a pack of monsters. Gotta wait for the servers to be stable and the game to be in less of a state of flux before you really try to play HC.
I'm not saying this as an argument against online-only play though...If you really wanted to play HC in D2, you had to do it on bnet (since you could just revive a dead HC character from an offline/open bnet account with an editor). They reset the ladders fairly often, so there was a fresh competition to see who could get the highest on a ladder character before death.