The Phrozen Keep

[Phrozen Heart]

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MORDINI	Does Blizzard object to people playing modded versions of D2 over open battle.net as long as they don't give players an unfair advantage in multiplay games? Are there any types of mods that you'd rather people stayed away from?
BILL	We are always intrigued and interested in the mods people make and, as with StarCraft and the Warcraft series, we have even provided editing tools to make this easier. We've seen some very polished and fun conversions for our games, and have no problems with total conversions, so long as they are for personal use and do not infringe our End User License Agreement included in our games, nor the rights of any other parties including copyrights, trademarks or other rights.
MORDINI	Do any of your programmer's ever look at current D2 mods for potential fixes and improvements? Well known mods such as Perfect Cell's Eastern Sun and V&K's Middle Earth contain a large number of changes to help balance the various aspects of the game.
BILL	While we do occasionally look at the work done by people in the Diablo community, we do not specifically refer to these mods for potential fixes or improvements. These mods are a valuable source of feedback in regards to the types of things some players want from the game, however, and we do like to have that type of connection to our community.
MORDINI	Along the same lines, is Blizzard open to suggestions from the public regarding updates and balancing in the new patches?
BILL	We maintain several Forums for Diablo II and its expansion set, and there is a lot of discussion within these channels regarding game balance and desired features. While we do not have the time to respond to all of the posts made in our Forums, members of the development team do visit there frequently and we have made changes in the games based on feedback pulled from these discussions.
MORDINI	Mod making at present is severely limited by the way that certain major elements of D2 are hard coded and therefore can't be manipulated that easily. Was there are any particular reason why some parts of the game were stored in txt files while others were hard coded in this way?
BILL	The creation of a game as massive as Diablo II requires the efforts of numerous programmers, many of which have differing styles of coding. Different ways of storing data -- hard-coding versus text files, for example -- are also often dictated by how the information will be use by the game, how important being able to easily modify the data is and also how quickly we need to retrieve the information. There were no anti-mod reasons for the style in which Diablo II was coded.
MORDINI	Total conversion mod making for big games such as Quake really took off when the creators made the source code available to the public. Do you have any intention of releasing the source code for D2 or LoD at any point?
BILL	We have no plans for releasing the Diablo II source code in the foreseeable future.
MORDINI	Do you have any intention of releasing any more official expansions for D2? Or are there any plans being laid for a D3?
BILL	We do not have any plans for creating another official expansion for Diablo II, although we will be creating and releasing more Horadric cube recipes, including Crafted and Rune Items, through patches and server updates.
MORDINI	While you have this opportunity, any comments you'd like to make about mods or mod making to the gameplaying public?
BILL	We take the creation of mods for our games as a huge complement. The time and effort involved is impressive, as are many of the results, and it is only when gamers have a passion for the original product are they driven to create such a quality experience.
MORDINI	Thanks a lot for your time, I'm sure the mod making public will be interested to hear what game's authors think of them :-)

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[url=https://www.d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=76]Knowledge Base - Interview - (2001-08-17) Bill Roper[/url]