d2r was just a hype and sale tactic to bring people off d2, to make them ready for d4 which no1 bother about anyway...
You can't be proud of an inzane good product which has stopped earned profit in america. All focus is to earn more money by degrading.
Thats how gaming industri is now.
Step 1:
Penalize, destroy or delete old good game. Make unnaccessible. (Blizzard did not 100% do this, instead they tricked player base over to d2r)
Step 2:
Hype up new game.
Step 3:
Release a bad bugged game with massive micro transaction possibilites.
Make the first couple of hours great and fun, so that people get tricked into buying battle pass and such. This is a tactic to get people to spend their first ingame money, to lower their barrier towards buying more.
Make sure game is bad enought for people to not get stucked on it, instead of buying new releases.
Step 4:
Promise massive bug fixes and such, and do nothing about it.
Step 5:
Hype up next game.
There is a tactic where the ratio between a good game and bad game should be 3.
1 good game, means you need to make 2 bad games before you can make a new good game. This is what makes short term most money.
The fact that they loose their playerbase and their trusts is of no matter, the guys on top has already moved on in true capalistic manouver to another product production. As a hero within that company and hated by player base.
Finally one thing we do agree on.
They should have kept updating d2 with small updates once or twice every year, or as necessary, and focus on keeping it bot and dupe free. And creating one single platform where all players could communicate, on the internet. I don't understand the weirdness of their update history, with soft changes and such. Just one or two new items every once or twice a year ... along with necessary upgrades. That would have been enough, and kept the game interesting. I would pay 1$ a month for that, it would keep two employers working full time to keep the servers 99% free of bots and dupers.