[Cushman]

I've always wondered what the ballpark was for people employed full-time playing Diablo 2. Thousands?

[guildchatter]

I dusted off my old copy of Diablo 2 last summer and played for a little while. The entire multi-player experience was dominated by bots spamming ads or bots that instantly pick up any rare items that dropped.

The botting was completely out of control.

I chatted with another player who used bots to farm for rare items and he claimed to have 24+ instances of the game running 24/7 split across several machines. He would check once a day to see if any of his bots managed to get a really, really rare item.

Kinda crazy... =]

[pavel_lishin]

You should ask him to do an AMA, if you can get a hold of him. I wonder how profitable this was - especially compared to, say, mining bitcoins.

[floody-berry]

If you actually play the game? Probably nothing. You need armies of bots to make anything with how badly item stores and duping dilute the economy. The economy has been a joke for years now; I'd actually be surprised if bots weren't the majority of "players" by now.

[Cushman]

Yeah, maybe I should have clarified that when I said "always" I meant "circa 2003" :P