Performance just never seemed good enough for me back in the day, and then more recently (admittedly, 2 or 3 years ago) the visual clutter was unbearable when I was the only one in the game: no way I was going to multiply that junk by more players. But in my experience I have not seen any multiplayer action in POE since the open beta days. Rose=tinted glasses on the memories, sure. D2Resurected will get old to me eventually, but if I feel bored I think I will just play a HC character until they get murdered. The only hardcore characters I ever played were public-games only characters, and over 90% the deaths were to other players. Or when the pk just couldn't find us because we were 2 and a half acts past the name of the game we were in (where we started). Or when we managed to group together and kill the pk (possibly with some casualties), It was always fun when a baal run turned into a slaughter because someone 30 levels above us went hostile and knew exactly where to find us, I liked it when someone popped in and tried to track me down and murder me, or grab the loot before I could from a boss kill. even when magic-finding mephisto over and over again. I never went around aggressively attacking people in public games, but I did purposefully make public games all the time. There was also player-killing in public games. Out of 10 or so years of me playing D2 on and off, I spent about 30 minutes total dueling people outside of the act 1 town.

Diablo 2: resurrected forum