Completely Confused On Creating Characters And Whether They Are Expansion Or Not

A while back, two good friends that I have played through every Diablo with, from the original, through Diablo 4 decided to come back to D2 based on the Resurrected version, and especially the new expansion. Wen all created a couple characters and started building and levelling. About a week ago, another longtime Diablo friend, who has been playing D2 the last couple years had a bow that he wanted to give me for my fledgling bowazon to help her as she worked through the early content. He also had a couple items that would help our other two friends, We went to meet in a game and kept having issues. He then identified that the bowazon, and barbarian that I had made, as well as the warlock and amazon that our other friends had made were not actual "expansion" characters.

We were mystified because on the character creation screen, we had all created our characters without changing anything related to that, as there was a box, to the right that said "expansion". He explained that you actually had the click on the box, and choose the option that listed the actual name of the expansion to create an expansion character. He also said that it wasnt abig deal,w e could simply convert them, though he didnt explain exactly how. Then we noticed the two buttons at the bottom right of the character screen. They were meant to convert your chahracter, but when we tried, nothing happened at all.

I was just abut to post here when I went to create a mule character earlier today, and left the "expansion" box alone, since, at least initially, my friends and I would be using it with our current characters. Today, even though I created (and later deleted three characters) with it set that way, they all turned out to be "expansion" characters as indicated by the X at the top right. I'm now completely lost. What is going on???

D2:R currently offers either 2 or 3 game versions, depending on whether or not you own Reign of the Warlock:
- Classic
- Expansion (aka LoD)
- Reign of the Warlock (aka RotW)

You can select any of those 3 (or 2 if you don't have RotW) during character creation via the dropdown at the bottom right. It should default to the latest available though, meaning RotW if you have that or Expansion if not.

Classic is the equivalent of the original D2 back in the day, without the old Lord of Destruction expansion.
Expansion is the equivalent of the original D2 with the Lord of Destruction expansion (hence "Expansion").
And Reign of the Warlock is the latest version that Blizz just released a week or so ago.

Both, Classic and the LoD expansion are part of the core D2:R game. Only RotW is a separate purchase.

Classic is the earliest version here, RotW the latest. If you have a character in any earlier version, that character can be converted to the next later one (all the way through) but not from later ones back to earlier versions. Such a "not the latest version" character will have a corresponding icon on the top right of the name tag in your character selection screen. To convert them, select the character and hit the little double-arrow convert icon on the bottom right (below "Create New").
Classic characters are marked by a blue banner with a white II on it. Expansion characters are marked by a brown banner with a lighter brown X on it. Reign of the Warlock characters do not get any such icon.

Characters of one game version can only join games with other characters of the same game version.

Keep in mind that in addition to the above, you also have ladder and non-ladder as game modes independent of the game version. And on top of that, you also have hardcore and softcore as modes independent of the other selections. Each of those game modes is also selected as desired during character creation. For those, you can't manually convert from one to the other although ladder will automatically convert itself to non-ladder at the end of a ladder season. For characters to be able to play together, they need to not only be in the same game version (see above) but also in the same game mode so all 3 need to match, such as e.g. "RotW, ladder, softcore".

And on top of all that, cross-play is limited by system type. PC players can't join console players and so on. PC Steam and PC non-Steam (so Battle.Net app) can theoretically play together but to do so, you currently need to make sure that all are logged into the same region as cross-region joining from non-steam to steam is bugged.

Chris Wilson recently posted a video on YouTube explaining how clever it was for Blizz to make RotW separate from expansion. It essentially gives Blizz the latitude to fundamentally change aspects of LoD version without removing the experience entirely from the player base. He referred to Classic and Expansion versions as 'museum' pieces.

ghostpos wrote: 1 hour ago

Chris Wilson recently posted a video on YouTube explaining how clever it was for Blizz to make RotW separate from expansion. It essentially gives Blizz the latitude to fundamentally change aspects of LoD version without removing the experience entirely from the player base. He referred to Classic and Expansion versions as 'museum' pieces.

Much as I agree with the approach, they really should've renamed "expansion" to "Lord of Destruction" in the char creator and such though to avoid confusing people, now that there's more than one expansion.

Totally agree @Schnorki it's become rather complicated and didn't need to be lol.