New Characters are not saving Offline on a Switch

I know the Switch has some real bugs with Diablo2 Resurectted, but not the expansion, though maybe the expansion still has the bugs.

For the life of me I can't get a new character to save. I have had 2 characters deleted in the past and lost a lot of collected items. So I am very careful about creating new characters, but now I can't seem to do it at all.

My steps:
1. I make a new character.
2. Do something in town.
3. Save and exit.
4. Go into another character, play a bit.
5. Save and exit.
6. Repeat until I see the spinning pentagram.
7. Go back to new character, do something else in town to force a save. Sell a potion, something like that.
8. Save and exit.
9. Force close the game.

In the past if the character is there after a force close, its gonna be fine but now its not.

I am now trying other things too.

I created an online charater, and that saved. But my offline I made before, gone.

So then I created 3 new Offline characters, then did those 9 steps above, all 3 are gone.

So I am really at a bit of a lose, any other ideas I could try?

Are you playing with the clock to manipulate tz?

JulieP wrote: 1 day ago

Are you playing with the clock to manipulate tz?

Oh for sure I am, but not when I am making new characters. Has that changed where there is some penalty or bug that messes all that up?

Do you have Switch Online? Could be an issue with cloud saves.

Hellspike wrote: 23 hours ago

Do you have Switch Online? Could be an issue with cloud saves.

No, the offline saves don't use that anyway, so I haven't put the money up for it

Its not even saving online characters, I am stumped, maybe they are having server issues or something

Is this SW1 or 2? I've had issues in the past with saves and like you, lost some important gear. I was using SW1. I can't advise the root cause but I know blizzard and Nintendo blame each other, no surprise there. I honestly feel it's just a quirk/limitation of the machine. Sucks. If possible, I'd recommend going pc. You can even use hero editor to make up for those lost items.

I dont have a switch and dont know if its possible, but if you can copy files from/to the device: there are online tools to edit save files, you could restore items you lost and remember the stats exactly as they were (they are for PC mostly but I guess the save file format is the same on switch)

biswbdiablo2io wrote: 1 day ago

JulieP wrote: 1 day ago

Are you playing with the clock to manipulate tz?

Oh for sure I am, but not when I am making new characters. Has that changed where there is some penalty or bug that messes all that up?

When I was playing on my switch, i did lose some progress after playing with the clock.
Sometimes not right after changing the time.
So i did do some TZ then reset the time and start a new char without touching the clock again.

I don't think its a penalty as such, but the game crashed and then i lost some progress on my char (Like going from lvl 60ish --->20).
Made me stop playing with the clock lol

Darkhold wrote: 17 hours ago

Is this SW1 or 2? I've had issues in the past with saves and like you, lost some important gear. I was using SW1. I can't advise the root cause but I know blizzard and Nintendo blame each other, no surprise there. I honestly feel it's just a quirk/limitation of the machine. Sucks. If possible, I'd recommend going pc. You can even use hero editor to make up for those lost items.

SW1, the LED version, I do have access to a SW2 but my wife isn't gonna give it up

Well this isn't going to help anyone I fear BUT, the character I just made does not stick across game closes.

I found my Online player test is a bad test, I don't pay for the Switch Online thing ($20 a year, I know, but its the Principle of the thing). So why the game let me make an Online character and even play him a little (I killed like 3 monsters and then left the game) is beyond me. But then it wouldn't let me back in to him without the Nintendo sub

I tried making a bunch of new characters, after 3 or 4 the game would lock up itself and all of them would be gone.

So I just decided to make 1 character and not play him at all. I went and killed one monster, sold the loot, save and exit.

I kept playing my other characters AND changing my clock for those juicy TZ runs on Andy, so that doesn't seem connected, and went about my thing.

Once I wanted to distribute my loot out to my mules from my TZ runs, I changed the clock back to sync (since trying to get to your mules on an out of sync clock is weird and hard for some reason) and saw my new char was still there, so i figured, what the heck lets close the came.

X to close out the game and my char is still there!

But here is the interesting thing. He was middle or so in my sorted list (switch sorts them by played last) and after I closed and opened the game, my new char is ALL the way at the bottom.

I plan to level this char, not just a mule, so I am going to keep all my gear for him in my shared tab to limit what i will lose if I do lose him, but I think he finally stuck.

What made him stick? I haven't a clue.

But I can say making multiple chars doesn't seem to help, and messing with your clock doesn't seem to affect anything either, though I would not have an out of sync clock when making a new char.

I am also at about 24 characters, I know some talk about keeping that number lower, but I also don't think that's it either. I used to have 30 that stuck just fine, but had removed some mules I didn't need to build other characters.

Hopefully this can help someone, and if you have questions later, feel free to resurrect the thread or PM me, happy to answer.