I bought the expansion set and have been having a blast! But now my bro is in town and I’d like to play it with him at the office on 2 computers over Battle.net. I’d also like to just play him 1 on 1, by hosting I assume. BUT, do I have to do anything special so that we can both play on Battle.net at the same time?
I don’t think this is illegal- I can’t see Blizzard expecting a family to buy a full version for every person in the house. I haven’t even tried loading them yet, cuz I don’t know what I should do…Should I load it on the server? Can I just install it on 2 computers and hand the cd back and forth? Will Battle.net even allow me to log in with 2 people on one cd/account?
Battle.net won’t let you log in with 2 people at the same time on 1 cd key. It also doesn’t do well with multiple cd-keys coming in over a NAT* network, as my roommate and I have discovered.
If you’re just playing each other, you can have one machine host a tcp-ip game, and have the other connect to it. You won’t have access to any characters you’ve made on battle.net, but you can use any local characters you may have.
I don’t remember if Diablo II lets you do a multiplayer-only spawn copy like Starcraft did. If it does, that’s a good course to take, if it doesn’t, then I’m not sure what will work. You might be able to get away with installing a copy on two machines and connect directly, but they might check their cd-keys against each other. I’m not really sure.
*Network Address Translation, where one “official” IP address is shared across a subnetwork. In this case, we have a cable modem connection that we share using a Netgear router.
mostly what buckgully said… and, if you’re using a lan network with one external ip address (NAT) then you’d have to use one comp over the normal internet connection and the other one would need to dial-up or use an alternate connection to the internet…
so, if you wanna play over battle.net (and assuming cd keys don’t pose a problem) one of you would have to dial out to an ISP.
if you just wanna play against each other over the lan it’s a lot easier and faster… use the assigned internal ip address… most probably in the format 192.168.0.x use winipcfg to confirm
I have no problems logging onto Bnet with 2 pcs and 1 IP address. As long as you have 2 CDkeys(which you don’t and is the real issue) and 2 seperate accounts you’ll be fine. What BNet won’t let you do is use the same account twice from the same IP. As for the OP, you can’t use Bnet without a second key. Depending how much you play, you could always pick up a copy of the battlechest thats out now. It gives you a second copy of D1, D2, and LOD and keys for all three. If you’re not willing to do that, you’ll have to play TCP/IP with a no-cd crack on one of the machines. And no, D2/LOD does not allow you to spawn, they removed that after Hellfire.
Here’s a question: If you need 2 CD keys, can I just buy the LOD expansion and use the original DII twice? So load Diablo II twice with the same CD-key, then upgrade the 2 computers with 2 seperate LOD disks (with 2 seperate CD-keys)? Cuz, the LOD upgrade is only $25-$30. I can try that…
I have a fixed-IP range LAN system, so each of the computers has its own IP address with the last 3 digits between 0-100.