Game Tip: Quitting And Rejoing Lobby Made And Single Player Games

Over the last few months players running Ubers have found it a little too challenging for their build, or have died while trying to kill Lillth,

Uber Mephisto, and sometimes

Baal (Uber Diablo is such a little girl). Concerned with losing their game and

Hellfire Torch several have made requests on D2.

Io for help recovering their bodies. If I can help them I will, but sometimes they’re in ladder games, and I’ve skipped the ladder season, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else available to help them, and as a result some have had to forfeit their games. Recently I started asking players if they knew they could save and exit their game and then recover their bodies in town, and to my surprise some didn’t. The last person who asked for help was successful in finding it, but didn’t know they could save, exit, and rejoin their game, and when told they could, this was the reply. Note that you can also quit and rejoin with a different build, and the game will stay as long as you don't make another game or logoff battlenet. Also note that in non lobby single player games the game name and password are the same.

They should teach a class on this stuff, the number of times I've had to go begging to people to come save me haha good stuff to know, thank you so much!

So I made a quick and dirty video demonstrating it, that will no doubt get me nominated by the Academy for the worst documentary how to film of 2026, so let's call it a work in progress.

It is ~5 minutes - I have tested this in the past by waiting just short of 5 minutes and barely more than 5 minutes and noting the difference. I just repeated the test in RotW and had the same outcome - when I waited 4:45, I was able to rejoin, when I waited 5:15, the game was gone.

Schnorki wrote: 1 month ago

Actually, you can log out.
You can even make a different game on a different region.
So long as you come back before your current game expires.
Just don't make or join a different game on the same region as that'll immediately close yours if there's noone else left in it.

The real question is how long it actually takes for a game to expire with noone in it.
I know it is multiple minutes at least but I've never bothered actually finding out just how long it really lasts before it closes.

So you can log out of Battlenet, log back on and the game will still be active?

mhlg wrote: 1 month ago

So you can log out of Battlenet, log back on and the game will still be active?

Yes, as long as you rejoin the game within 5 minutes. The servers don't care if you're logged in or not - the game remains up until the 5 minutes expires or someone (anyone) joins before that.

That’s actually how I transfer items from one account to another. However, it did failed once, and I never did it again. But also because I got my Mac running d2r so I just two accounts running.

I just verified that logging off of battlenet and back on doesn't immediately delete the game. After that I made another single player game, quit it, and tried to rejoin the game but it was gone. I will try a different region next.

Edit: I just made a game, logged off Bnet, switched region to Eu, made a game, logged out of it, then switched back to NA, and the game was sill there so that's verified.

Schnorki wrote: 1 month ago

Timecourse23 wrote: 1 month ago

That’s actually how I transfer items from one account to another. However, it did failed once, and I never did it again. But also because I got my Mac running d2r so I just two accounts running.

Brings to mind the good ol' days of finding a hidden corner in some public game to drop all your stuff in to get it onto a different character because there was no shared stash and even permed games (which you actually had to wait to perm..) would repeatedly brick themselves and close. Gotta say, I don't miss that. ^^

Yuppers...been there done that.

Nothing like going into some random (but mature game), quickly unload stuff in the

Blood Moor near some wall.

And likewise...being curious about high levels entering my Act 1 New multiple times to spy on what their dropping...and then..

Hi all, I am playing D2 on Playstation these days and haven't figured out how to rejoin a pw protected game, if it is even possible. Grateful if someone could let me know.

I do remember that this is how I used to transfer loot to mules back in the D2LoD days

Kbob2 wrote: 1 month ago

Hi all, I am playing D2 on Playstation these days and haven't figured out how to rejoin a pw protected game, if it is even possible. Grateful if someone could let me know.

I do remember that this is how I used to transfer loot to mules back in the D2LoD days

The PS UI for creating & joining password protected games in D2R is a bit unintuitive. I can't write it down off the top of my head (I'd need to have the TV in front of me with the game running), but I can help with that later when I'm at home (assuming I remember lol).

Sounds great, thx!

Earlier I used a shard to terrorize act 1. While playing in the Tamoe Highlands I got disconnected, so I exited to the character screen and selected online which worked. I then tried to log back in to the game and I received the message, "Failed to join game. This character is already in a game on this server. Please try again." Not ready to give up I logged off the game, and had to wait a bit because the play button was greyed out. When it became available, I clicked play and returned to Lobby. My game name and password were erased so I reentered them and to my surprise, after all that the game was still there. I immediately took the

Black Marsh waypoint, entered the Highlands and when I got close to where I was playing when my game became disconnected, there was a

Gul lying on the Ground.