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Clearly, the end game leaves *much* to be desired by modern standards: It degenerates into killing Baal--or worse, cows--pretty much until the end of time. In theory, the path to that point should be enjoyable and involve a fair amount of build-up, but that's trivially short-circuited by the power-leveling process. So there's really no challenge that determined players can't overcome very easily, especially since much of the game is designed to be conquered by players in highly mediocre gear, especially in groups.
And that's a problem of its own. There's really not much of a goal to aspire to in the Diablo 2 end game, other than the acquisition of more gear. Say what you will about WoW's end game: there is plenty of challenging content available for players in top-end gear (even if that content is all raid-oriented). I'd really like to see Diablo 3 improve on this to a great extent, to extend the longevity a bit. Presumably they still want players to be able to conquer the highest difficulty solo, so I suppose the "extended difficulty" could take the form of explicit challenges that are designed for groups of players (i.e. having beaten Hell at least once, you can talk to a shadowy agent who gives you a special group-only task).
In fact, group play tends to be where the Diablo 2 challenge curve falls apart. The scaling mechanism is *extremely* straightforward: monster health scales linearly with the number of players in the game. On the other hand, players can take advantage of group synergies to effectively get more powerful at a faster-than-linear rate, up until the game is basically trivial with eight players at any level of gear. While the game remains very very difficult for a solo player who isn't in top-end gear. So the sweet spot, as far as player enjoyment goes, ends up being a game with two to four players (beyond that it ends up being a little busy anyway). The scaling just isn't working very well.
In general, while Diablo 2 multiplayer ends up being fun because the game is generally a lot of fun, the overall multiplayer polish is really lacking, and exists solely as a gear grind with copious spec experimentation. I think group-only multiplayer scenarios are the real answer here for the end game, but I also think that it wouldn't kill them to limit the multiplayer experience at four players just to make the target a little more reasonable. I don't think many people really have seven other friends they need to play with all the time.
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