AA, I really don't have anything to prove to you about what I think is fun for me, and I don't really care what is fun for you. My post wasn't directed at you, or anyone for that matter. I was simply sharing my personal experiences with what is likely a larger pool of real people in a daily setting that I personally observed playing D2 than most people on this forum have (maybe I'm wrong, but I'll bet I'm mostly right). This was between 2001 and 2002, which for me were the golden days of D2.
What I'm saying is that I observed hundreds of people every week sit down and spend a large portion of their time watching a bot run while either playing CS on another computer, or playing MTG, or smoking, or fighting, or sleeping on one of our couches at the PC bang, or doing food runs. My point is that most people have an opinion of D2 based primarily on their personal experiences and those of a few of their friends they played with. My personal experience is likely different from most in that I had a large pool of time to draw from during which I'm talking about (I was in the shop at least 10 hours a day, during peak times 7 days a week almost, for a good 6-8 months.) I can count on 1 hand the number of people that played D2 in my shop for more than an hour a day without botting, I can even name 3 of them directly.
We had guys that would trade botted items to people in the shop for things like cigarettes, food, etc. This was maybe unique to my shop, but I'll bet it wasn't.
AA, I really am not trying to discredit anything you are saying (or copy/pasta'ing). TBH, I didn't even read the TL

R wall you (re)posted. I didn't post to swing my dick around or confirm/deny any one else's perspective of this franchise. I just shared my experience and my opinion of the franchise based on those experiences. You're welcome to disagree! You're welcome to call me names, or question my sanity, my taste in games, or whatever else floats your boat. At the end of the day, *I* had fun playing 700+ hours of Diablo 3.