Blizzard is having yet another beta test, but surprisingly enough, it's not for a new product, and you don't have to sign up!

It's for the new Diablo II expansion 1.10 patch, which makes so many changes to the game (the list is 11 pages long!) that the experts at Blizzard software decided to have a public beta test for it.

All you have to do is go to the Beta Test Site and download the patch. Just be warned that once you have it installed you won't be able to play on Battle.net unless you run a batch file they've provided to revert back to your original version.

I find it quite amazing that they would go to this extent supporting a product released more than a year ago. Just further evidence that Blizzard is more dedicated to making flawless games than they are to making money.

Blizzard has a long standing history of releasing a product and then supporting the product for the entire duration of it's lifetime. Looking back, Blizzard literally only releases a game a year, starting at Diablo basically, but they continue to improve and support these games as long as they are played. The original Diablo and Starcraft are still very popular. There are probably even people playing WC2 bnet edition still. This is one of the things that contributes to my utmost respect for this company. I own just about every Blizzard PC game to date, including originals of most of the obscure early day games such as Warcraft and Blackthorne. I can't say that about any other PC game maker.

Another amazin thing about those Blizzard folks is they still manage to provide a free online service to play all their games on, irregardless of the fact the industry has switched to a "Pay 2 Play" trend. Blizzard also pays tremendous attention to the opinions of their customers. For example, in the Frozen Throne expansion, during the Blood Elf campaign, there is a secret tower defense level, tower defense maps being incredibly popular on battle.net. I thought this was a really cool example of just how much Blizzard knows it's customers and what they like.

Crap, turned into a Blizzard rant. Oh well, nothing better to do. Anyway, about this patch, I'm reading the changes now, will probably give it a shot, unless there are a bunch of changes I don't like. I'm a little perturbed I can't try it online, nor play online at all while it's in, but... we'll see.

Actually I'll bet the reason Blizzard put a Tower Defense level into The Frozen Throne is because THEY like to play tower defense levels, not only because their customers do.

But it shows you they at least pay attention to the trends on Bnet.

But see, they pay attention to the trends the same way I do, by playing on battle.net!

Woah, okay, this patch rules. For the sole reason of "synergy" upgrades (where the lower lever build ups of skills give boosts to the higher level ones as well) So you don't have to just horde your skill points to get maxed out high level skills. This works MUCH better. If I still had my assassin she would probably rule now. I really can't wait until they apply this to battle.net, I may totally get into D2 again.

I noticed that with my new druid. Unfortunately, I've never actually played D2 offline before, so I had no characters made before I applied the patch.

This patch also makes my already relatively useless strategy guide even more irrelevant. Joy.