Back in the hey day of Diablo 2 I was playing Starcraft every night till the wee hours of the morning and never got a chance to enjoy it's awesome. With D3 coming out, I'm kind of interested in checking it out. However it is primarily a multiplayer game, and while I'm sure a community still exists for it (it's a blizzard game after all) my question is, is that community viable for a newb to come play in? Will there be any other low level characters playing at all? Will I be able to play for more than twenty minutes without somebody saying I'm an idiot and then describing my idiocy in some esoteric diablo language in hopes of shaming me into competency? Is it nothing more than an arid wasteland of hax and people that are so devoted they've been playing since the late 90s? I know they are still patching the game, but that speaks highly only of blizzard and says nothing of the community. Any D2 players around that know what the scene is like?

I never played multiplayer really... there's a huge single player game there that you can play too you know...

Yeah, but it seems like it focuses on the multiplayer. To be honest in all these years you're the first person I've heard even talk about the single player.

D2 is like WoW, except you spam two abilities instead of four and all the social interaction is gone.

But hey, no subscription fee. So if grinding is your thing, enjoy!

Yes. Pleanty of people are playing, in mid day there were about 40k people on Bnet playing LoD. Tha game is absolutely awesome.

Haven't played in a while, but I wouldn't be worried about a lack of low levels. People are always rerolling characters, mainly because you can't change the way your character is built (skill/stat point build) without making a new character.

It may be hard to find geniune noobs (to play the whole story through with as opposed to power-leveling), or "nice" people, though. For many people I know, Diablo II is the first game that made them wonder, "Why are people such assholes online?"

Fun times...

Yes. I just replayed it with a friend not long ago. If you try mods for the game, it gets even better.

Uh yes?

Diablo 2 is a classic for a reason.

I barely played the game a few years back and I loved it. Visuals are a little bland but its definitely worth checking out.

I would suggest grabbing a couple friends who have it and playing it off Battle.Net instead.  That way you can keep your character and stuff instead of having it periodically deleted by Blizzard.