Diablo 3 is superior to Diablo 2

Thank you for a well reasoned and thoughtful argument and I appreciate another kindred Diablo enthusiast. I purchased D1, D2, and D3 on their respective release dates, and played the heck out of each one of them. I like to compare the Diablo trilogy to the Star Wars Trilogy (the original trilogy). D1 forever changed gaming in the same way Star Wars forever changed movies. It was epic. Empire Strikes Back is arguably one of the best sequels ever (1) by changing and improving on the original, but keeping true to the spirit of the original. D2 did the same to D1. D3, while still good, dumbed down its predecessors, and did not improve enough on it. Hello Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. (Then came the death spiral brought on by JarJar Binks. I simultaneously cringe and salivate when I think of a Diablo IV) I played D2 for 8 years. I never spent real money on the game. I traded for about 4 or 5 items in that whole time. Everything else I found was self found. And I found a lot. I kept a spreadsheet of all the Set and Unique items in the game, and I found 78.1% of them. And D2 did not have sucky versions of a specific Unique or Set item. I achieved Matriarch/Patriarch with all 7 classes, and multiple times with some of them. In D3, my main is a Paragon 69 Witch Doctor with 136K DPS. I have played him for just under 600 hours. I have probably another 250 hours on other characters. No real money spent. I will go through each of your points, since I think they make a better argument for me than they do for you.Ease of UseInvestment I agree with you that few people got their first character to finish Hell in D2. Most likely, they made major mistakes, and had to go back to the drawing board. Of course there were lots of mis-spent stat points, incorrectly created runewords, and bad skill choices. But that is EXACTLY what made D2. It is called investment. Theordore Roosevelt said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” (2) Restarting a build is difficult. Realizing you messed up on stat points or skills in D2 caused pain, and it took effort to get yet another build to the end game in D2. But that is what made it worth while. Many players frown on cheating in a game. But what is cheating? Cheating is essentially getting something good without “earning” it. In D2, “earning” something meant hours of gameplay, researching builds, testing builds, etc. You yourself mentioned D2 still has an active community. 13 years after it was released! People do not stick with a game that long unless they have investment in the game. In contrast, D3 does not encourage investment in the same way D2 does. In D3, if I am playing a Monk, and hear about another better Monk build, I can switch skills within seconds and buy new gear in the AH within minutes. If I do not like the build I can easily switch to something else. I can test 10 builds in one day. In D2, to test 10 builds it would take weeks, maybe months. Sense of Accomplishment For the 8 years I played D2, I was actively involved in the D2 community. I made many friends, shared experiences, laughed, and cried with the community. In the year since D3 has been released, I have struggled to find a good D3 community that was as close as that D2 community was. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons is sharing a sense of accomplishment among D2 players. In D2, if someone announced a new, viable build they had found, it was because there was a sense of pride in what they had accomplished. They wanted to share that with others. I myself wrote 3 different build guides for certain builds I had succeeded with. The guides covered strategy in different areas, where to spend stat points and skill points, what runewords worked, where to farm the socketed items to build them with, what immunities caused problems for the build, and how to work around them, how to defeat certain bosses, what affixes to look for in items, etc. In D3, build guides are as simple as listing what skills to choose. Except for a few select builds, there is no difference in what items you look for. The strategy for all fights is to lay on the damage as quickly as possible. There are no immunities to account for. In D2, if you found someone with good items, very often it meant they had found those items, or worked hard to get them. You could look up to them and congratulate them on their accomplishment. In D3, when I see someone with good items, I KNOW they did not find them all by themselves, and very likely they spent real world money to get those items. Time Well Spent In D2, you mention people grabbing loot first since it was community drop, and I agree that this is where D3 improves on D2, but in D2 there are multiple ways around this. As I mentioned before, D2 had a stronger sense of community, and playing with people who you frequently posted with on some community forum was the best way to do Multiplayer. It was rare that you would fight over items if you knew who you were playing with. For my D2 experience, I played Single Player (SP) almost exclusively. In SP, there is no fighting over gear. Those people who played non-passworded, Multiplayer games in D2 quickly figured out that was NOT the way to play. A Proper Economy It is true that D2 had a major problem with their economy. D3 attempted to fix this by introducing the Auction House (AH) and the Real Money Auction House (RMAH). When it comes to the RMAH, unfortunately, this was the wrong way to go about it. Jay Wilson, D3's Game Director, admitted such in an interview in March after he left the D3 team. (3) In his words “It's not good for a game like Diablo. It doesn't feel good to get items for money, it feels good to get items by killing monsters." I could not have said that better myself. Although they have not admitted it directly, many people believe Blizzard is regretting the RMAH. The Console Version of the game that is coming out is removing the RMAH. (4) The presence of the AH itself is minor. It is the necessity of the AH that is the biggest problem. With 15 months of playing almost 600 hours, my Plvl 69 Witch Doctor has 1 piece of equipment he is currently using that was self found. Everything else was purchased in the AH. There is no sense of accomplishment in that. My WD is not finding and using gear. He is grinding for gold in order to buy that next minimal upgrade. This is in no way unique to myself. Other than crafted items, I doubt any character that can handle over MP1 in Inferno is using more than 2 items they found themselves. My WD is the only one I use AH purchases on. Mostly so he can farm for my other characters. I recently tried a character that was using ONLY equipment he found himself. It gets extremely difficult after Act 1 Hell, and virtually impossible in Inferno MP0. Any level of Monster Power in Inferno is out of the question.Conclusion This is not a bash on D3. I love the game, but it pales in comparison to D2. Things are getting better, and I hope an expansion pack to D3 is as incredible as Lord of Destruction was for D2. The main thing D3 lacks in respect to D2 is the investment, sense of accomplishment, and years of replayability that D2 had. D2 is still being played 13 years after release. I do not see D3 surviving that long. Not when you can experience the entire game in a couple of months by using a credit card.References(1)http://www.empireonline.com...(2)http://www.goodreads.com... (3)http://www.ign.com... (4)http://www.penny-arcade.com...