In
Diablo I,
PK's were a quite big problem.
Blizzard promised that in Diablo II, it'd be A LOT harder to PK people. In Diablo II, you wouldn't be able to damage someone unless you toggled that you were hostile to that player. Hostility would only be possible to toggle while in town. THEN you could leave town and start searching for people to kill. Thus, if you're
peacefully walking around,
slaughtering monsters, and a PK shows up in the game,
you would be given ample warning before he could hurt you. So, if you are afraid of being PK'ed, you could just leave the game.
It failed miserably, too.
They predicted that some people would just go to town through a TP, go hostile, then return to the game. That'd kinda ruin the point of the warning. So, they implemented the nice feature that all TP's close whenever you go hostile to someone.
They still missed a few loopholes, though.
1. WAYPOINTS. Waypoints don't close upon hostile. There are two fairly simple (and luckily, not that widespread) ways to abuse waypoints:
a) Wait in town. Don't be hostile to anyone. When someone uses a TP, it will display in which area of the game they are if you highlight it. Thus, you can keep quite good check of where in a game the other people are. Whenever someone uses a waypoint, you'll be able to guess pretty accurately which waypoint they just used (especially in act IV, where the waypoints are so far away from each other). When they leave town again, go hostile and exit through the waypoint. Voila.
b) Party with someone. The next time you go to town together through a waypoint, make sure he exits town first. Go hostile. Exit town. Kill. Even easier. It can be hard finding people who wants to party at high levels, (partially out of fear of PK's, mostly because soloing in 8 player games gives more experience points) though.
2. You don't have to be hostile to kill someone. Just lure a nasty monster pack to a town portal or a waypoint when someone is in town. As they leave town, they die. Easy as cake.
3. Hacks and bugs - before, it was possible to go hostile outside of town thanks to a hack. It was also possible to go through your own town portal directly after you go hostile with the correct timing. (This was REALLY damn hard, though.) Luckily, these were fixed in a patch.
This wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't for the existence of
hardcore mode. In hardcore, you only have one life.
ONE. If someone
hostile shows up right next to you, and you didn't even KNOW they were hostile, this clearly shows that
the system is
BROKEN. Plus, it takes SECONDS to kill a character with a semi-decent PvP character. An
amazon can kill a
sorceress in about 2 seconds. If the sorceress lags just a wee bit,
BOOM.
Dead. It's so easy killing people in
Diablo II it's embarrasing. Oh, and you'll often spend WEEKS getting a hardcore character to a decent level. Luckily, there are
PKK's... =)