Wow, they made Diablo 3 a rent-a-game? You know, a game you pay for as if you bought it, but in reality you only rented it until Blizzard sees fit to shut down their servers? Pass.
You do realize that the original Diablo came out in 1996 and you can still play that game for free on Battle.net, 16 years later right? I don't see Blizzard shutting down servers anytime soon. Isn't it EA that has a tendency to kill off older versions of games that have an online component?
I've been playing the game since launch and I participated in the open beta. Have there been a few server problems, sure. They did have 7.5M copies hit the streets in the first week, counting the 1.2M free copies from people doing the WoW Annual Pass deal. They did a very small (especially when you consider each character has over 30 powers and each power has 5 runes) fix yesterday that included about half bug fixes and about half nerfs as far as player abilities and rune changes went. They're doing pretty well as far as that goes.
As for the NPCs and stash being cross character, I have to wonder how much loot switching the OP did in D2. Whether it was just between my own characters via a "mule" (aka a bank character) or with friends in the game to hold it open while I hopped characters quick, in D2 people would swap loot to other characters they didn't play just so they could pass things around. The unified loot solves that problem.
No passing money and gear thru your mule to get it to a new character you are starting. Or your Barbarian finds 2 Paladin set pieces. Would you really vendor them? No, you would either have a trusted friend in game or be in your own passworded game, drop them on the ground, quickly switch characters, and rejoin the same game. BAM! Paladin is now well geared.
A year before WoW came out the 1.10 Diablo 2 patch was released that added skill synergies. This meant no more waiting so many levels before you actually started putting points in abilities. Now you could power up some abilities that would give you bonuses along the way. Some friends from an online BBS and I started playing D2 again every night, trading gear, cubing runes up and sharing the wealth. We played for hours every night right up until WoW came out and we started a day 1 guild that lasted for over 5 years.
I know I played plenty of D2 solo at home and occasional games of it over LAN when 5 of us were living together, but I definitely spent more time on B/net, especially when you started seeing drops that were not in the home game and would only be in the ladder games online. Very cool stuff and some of it was pretty achievable even at low levels.
I keep seeing people refer to D3 as a single player game. It isn't. Blizzard has made the 3rd Diablo an online game. Yes, you can choose to play it alone, but even doing that, if you have any friends on your list, they are always a quick message away, even if they're playing SC or WoW. The game is an online game and while single player is an option, it's seems clearly designed to foster an online community, which Diablo 2 did as well, w/much worse tools.
In teh end I coudl care less. My wife and I are both having a great time w/it, but so far it's been working on our own characters. I have a 4 day weekend this week and I think when we're not at the pool w/the kids, we may well be playing D3 some more. After all, I burn real easily and we're already going to be out all Friday evening. Need to hide from the daystar some