There has been a lot of talk within the community regarding multiplayer enhancements in Diablo II. Most of the discussions have revolved around the player killing controversy, and although the "discussion" has gone on for some time now, nothing has been decided. Blizzard has definitely been thinking about the topic, and the community of dedicated followers who want something to be done, and there is some talk of a dueling arena where people can take out their dueling pleasures without annoying those who do not which to take part in it. Check the community section for more opinions on the PKing issue.

Perhaps the biggest improvement in multiplayer games, will be the lack of cheating. Blizzard has gotten nothing but bad criticism for their faults in security as far as Diablo goes. As any veteran knows, the streets of Battle.net were absolutely littered with cheating, hacking, and duping players who ruined the entire experience for some. Since then, Blizzard has done their best to stop the cheating, but has done so in vein. They have vowed to solve the problem in the sequel. For security
reasons, Blizzard will not release any information as to how they plan on stopping the cheating. However, they are promising that it will be stopped. We hope for the best.

As technology has gotten better in the past several years, Diablo II will now allow for up to eight players on Battle.net. Blizzard stated that there was no practical reasoning for not allowing so many players in the first game, and so doubling the amount of players in the sequel shouldn't be a big issue. Skeptics are worried that eight players will be too much for the system to handle, since four was considerably plagued with lag issues. However, for LAN games, or for players with
fast ISP's, eight shouldn't be much of a problem.

Some other improvements will allow for an easy item trading system, so that bartering will be much easier than before. There will also be some type of built in clan support, to enforce the entire community aspect that Blizzard wants to endorse. How they will implement this clan support is unknown at this time, but we are all looking forward to it.

Additionally, Blizzard will have a dueling arena specifically for you player killers out there which will be a great place to test your abilities of fighting real, live human players. There is no word yet on how the gameplay of this arena will be done, but speculation says it will include plenty of team play options. World wise player rankings are a possibility, but not confirmed.