Originally Posted by Thaurin
I tried Diablo II for a while, also years late. I too was a little underwhelmed, but maybe for different reasons. I wasn't used that kind of gameplay at all and I wasn't sure how to play it. Apparently, you're supposed to play it online and that's not seamless with offline.

Yeah it's measure of protection, so you don't bring a cheated character onto battle.net. If the character is store on their servers, they can constantly check if you're cheating.
You can take a singleplayer into multiplayer in Diablo 2, but only in LAN. Not Battle.net. Which seems very reasonable to me.