The crappening of Tristram

Hello there.

Dear Diablo development team. I don't know what's wrong with you or maybe with me... This Blizzcon you've really, really disappointed me.
No, I don't want to say that you aren't professional enough or anything like that. I believe that you're all very professional. Cunning administrators, brilliant programmers, talented artists etc. There's no denying of that.

Yet... Just how? How did you manage to understand the idea of honoring the memory of Diablo 1 so, so mind-numbingly wrong?
I understand, you have to promote Diablo 3. It's your creation, your child, and your responsibility to bear. Alright, you're welcome, develop it further, make it better, although I won't buy anything of that any time soon. Sorry about that.

But when it comes to the old Diablo games... The Darkening of Tristram... More like the Crappening of Tristram!
Really, there was no way to get the idea more wrong than you did.
We, old players, have waited for quite a long time for if not an HD-remaster, but at least for a stable, Bnet 2.0 compatible version of D2, not to mention D1. Yet instead, you treat us with this.

Do you know, that Diablo 1 still runs on most modern systems? Yes, there are some troubles with the colors, but they are solvable, easily.
But it works. With all the glorious pixels (which still look better than what you have shown us), choppy animations and even more! There were other mechanics you could consider unique, like, constantly wrong values of spell damage in the spell book or suboptimal implementation of projectiles that made it impossible to hit a remote target from certain angles. Also let's not forget unremovable friendly fire. Maybe you didn't know about that, I guess?
Not to mention Diablo 1 for Sony PlayStation 1 with colored lighting and all the cool graphical features of emulators. Did you remember about that?
Yet, you pretend like it's an old old relic of the past which isn't around anymore. But it is. And it is still competing with you.

What I am trying to say is that, instead of making old things better, you make new things worse. Even worse than they were.
Just like Kevin Martens said "And... Everything gets crappy!"

So, let me tell you this. Nobody needs this crap. Nobody needs those "glorious pixels" and sloppy animations. We, the older player base, wanted just the opposite - modern resolution, remastered sprites, old errors fixed, increased compatibility with modern systems.

Now that I'm thinking about that... Perhaps, you aren't the ones to blame. Perhaps it was the Blizzard authority. They came to you and demanded to do "something classic for the 20th anniversary". And you agreed. But you should have known, that your team wasn't the right choice to do the job. Like, what could you do? Order some of your developers and artists to drop the current project and start recreating/refactoring 20 years old source code? Redraw the old 8-bit graphics? Even I, with all my current anger, am not so stupid to expect such a thing from your team.

But you should have known what you're doing. Instead of what everyone (okay, let's say it was just me) expected you've delivered just the opposite. Instead of reviving the old, you disfigured the new. Instead of HD-graphics you spent efforts to implement artificial pixelation. Instead of adding something new you've deleted features that nobody had problems with.
Perhaps you should have done the same that WoW team did. Prior to BlizzCon they, I mean, J. Allen Black, said on the forums that there will be no announcements about the classic servers. What prevented you from doing the same by saying, that no, there won't be anything remastered? Does somebody need to visit your office and push the market analysis data and almost working project against your face to make you see what people want?

In conclusion, please, don't touch the old Diablo anymore. You didn't know what to do with it to begin with and you still don't. And I don't know as well.

Best regard,
a dork who doesn't play but still complains.