There's a very real possibility it wasn't your connection that was the problem. Since Diablo 1 was a peer to peer game it was super easy to just flood another player to lag them out and steal their crap.

The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force.

It was a mess. Going into a public game was basically just asking to get screwed over.

What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!]

edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars

good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A

Oh yeah, I remember being really impressed by the Guild Wars/ArenaNet tech at launch. It felt like a game changer.

Heck, they did a better job than most games do to this day. Often when a game has the ability to start before completing the download, it just means you get to look at the main menu.

It also really helped a lot of folks in the game development community when Carmack published his thoughts on dealing with latency in QuakeWorld around that time, and the Valve guys working with the Quake3(?) engine published something a bit later that pretty good IIRC.

I love the part where he talks about people thinking the installer was broken or didn't download fully because it was so small. They ended up padding it with some assets to make it feel more authentic.

I emailed him a few times about the reverse-engineering effort for the old Battle.Net games (PVPGN)

He's a really nice, approachable guy as well. He was quite impressed at how well the program worked, even with how old the games were

Which programmer/game was that? Mike O'Brien on Guild Wars? (Just going through credits on mobygames ;))

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Ah! OK, I saw his name too and figured that was also potentially the person. Oh, he was a founder of ArenaNet?!! Very cool! I met a lot of their staff last year at PAX. Great group of ppl IMO and those I spoke to were proud to work there. I guess Pat would be one of the founders they spoke of! :)

And who and what is that?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

What mmo? Or what was his name?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Weird, my impression was that the Guild Wars people were ex-Microsoft. Do wonder where i picked that up...

Who was it?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

You could make yourself invulnerable in multiplayer games using Great-BoBaFeTT's trainer.

http://www.geocities.ws/free_bobafett/main.htm

Obligatory genius video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A

Great talk!

Sometimes, you can still use a broken cd.

I wouldn't risk it anymore. One time I received an ever so slightly cracked DVD from Netflix. Desperate to watch the show without waiting for a better copy to be mailed, I stuck it in the computer anyways. Ended up shattering and taking my DVD drive with it!

I don't know about OG diablo but you might be able to register your cd key on Blizzard's site and play the game through their on-line launcher.

I know this works (or worked) with Warcraft 3.

OG Diablo didn't even have a cd-key, unfortunately.

That's one way to get a free DVD drive from Netflix.

Or just go buy it for $10.

Grabbed an external HDDVD drive for the $10 actually. Even came with a handful of movies at that price!

Ironically (in context of this thread) the one time I've had this happen was my Diablo II CD way back in the day, I don't know if it was damaged or if the disk just got stressed from heat but it shattered and ruined the drive in my mother's computer.

I have no love for optical media anymore.

The cd was completely broken in 4-5 pieces. Actally I was impressed of how badly it was damaged because I had thrown other CDs down and they didn't even get a scratch (they were mainly cd-r though)!

I used up all the spins on a Lord of Destruction CD years ago too. Had a hard time convincing my computer retailer that the cause of death was natural causes. I still have the largest shard tucked away somewhere - the rest was dust.

I played Diablo II on a 55.6 kbps modem. Worked fine.

Diablo II specifically includes design elements to be playable via 56k dialup.

1) Latency hiding. The results of actions are determined ahead of time. The hit chance and damage value for melee swings and missile shots (arrows, spell effects) are calculated when you start a weapon swing or bow fire or spellcasting action. The duration of the action hides the network lag; by the time your sword finishes swinging, the packet describing the results has arrived.

2) Low bandwidth. The client does a lot of autonomous prediction and extrapolation. The server typically sends updates of monster positions at intervals of several seconds, rather than every frame. This can create situations where your attacks seem to automatically miss because the monster you think you're attacking isn't where your client thinks it is. But better to have that "lag haze" than to not be playable at all for lack of bandwidth.

This was all implemented for Diablo II after learning from the first Diablo.

Yeah, I played on a 28.8 modem. What he's describing is probably the result of someone using a "trainer"/cheat software that would essentially packet-flood the other player(s) so you can kill them and take all their stuff while they cannot respond/escape. Happened all the time once those hacks became prevalent, kinda ruined the [public multiplayer aspect of the] game IMO :(