[rmrfrmrf]

> The reason Blizzard went online only with Diablo 3 and SC2, was because the Diablo 2's battle.net was reverse engineered, and there was an abundance of servers that could be played on with a fake CD Key all over the world.

I don't think that's the only reason. Diablo II is plagued with bots and duping. While the balance between client-server data on the Battle.net closed realms is much better than it was with Diablo (where you could just edit your character data locally to increase gold/upgrade inventory online), Diablo II still has the problems of 1) loading the entire level map into memory at once, giving bots the opportunity to path their way to POIs with no effort and 2) reconciling local inventory with the server's inventory after lag spikes and server crashes, which is hypothesized to be the main method dupers use.

But, as could be expected, both botting and duping happen on D3 anyway. And, to your point, during the D3 beta period, there were several devs that were able to reverse-engineer the D3 protocol anyway and create a local server. shrug