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Trading within Diablo 2 involves exchanging in-game items for other virtual goods including gold and equipment. After returning back from my quests to resupply at a town, I jumped into chat and asked “ What’s going on here?” Quickly several anonymous voices chatted back: “ Trade.” While I was attempting to smite Mephisto and progress along the central storyline, others were rapidly flooding the chat with various commands and garbled phrases that eventually took over my peripheral vision. “ 2 SOJs 4 LVL 60 Plate Armor” and other phrases poured across my screen a torrential pace, with players running back and forth, jumping in and out of the server.
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I remember connecting to Diablo 2’s servers, clicking on the first available campaign, and being confronted in chat with lists of jumbled acronyms and numeric equations. When I first started playing Diablo 2 around the time of its release in 2000, I didn’t much care for playing online.
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