1.10 Patch Info
Ladder Character FAQ
We've updated our Ladder Characters FAQ, since it's so often asked about. This info is 99% sure, since Blizzard has explained it several times, and not added any new info about how Ladder Chars will work in many months.
Here is Blizzard's initially announcement, back in May 2002:
We are introducing a new type of character, called a ladder character. There will now be two types of characters: normal and ladder. All characters created before 1.10 will be considered normal characters. Characters created before 1.10 will not have the option of being ladder characters. You must create a new character after patch 1.10 is released, and mark it as a ladder character to create a ladder character.
Characters created before patch 1.10 will not be able to join games with these new ladder characters, although they will be able to play with other normal characters that predate the 1.10 patch or characters created after 1.10 that are not created as ladder characters. This means that for the duration of the ladder season - which is yet to be determined - these ladder characters will exist in a new separate economy from the other Battle.net Diablo II characters.
How will Ladder Characters work?
A ladder character is just a newly-made character, in v1.10, that you choose, at the time of creation, to make eligible for the ladder. They will be unable to mix with current characters, so the ladder character economy will be pure, for a while at least. You'll have to actually play your ladder char to level them up, since you won't have friends with lvl 90 chars to turbo you, give you waypoints, twink equipment, etc. The first few weeks of ladder chars, especially hardcore, should really show who is good at playing, or at least lucky in their low-MF item finding.
You can make v1.10 characters non-ladder, and they'll mix with all current characters just like a v1.09 one does now.
You can make hardcore or softcore ladder characters.
You don't need a new account to make ladder characters.
If you have an account that can make HC chars now, you can make HC v1.10 ladder chars on it. (You don't need to make a softcore ladder char and beat Baal in order to make a HC ladder char.)
There may be some special bonuses for ladder characters, other than being on the ladder. Blizzard is considering making some of the new items (uniques, Runewords, crafted recipes, etc) available only for ladder characters. Mostly it's a way for players who think they have skills, or who don't have a huge amount of good stuff stored up now, to start over on a level playing field, and compete with everyone else starting from scratch.
How long will the Ladder season last?
This isn't know, and Blizzard has made no comment on it. Normal Warcraft and Starcraft ladder seasons run 3 months, but that doesn't mean the D2X one will. We expect that Blizzard will be watching to see how popular ladder characters are, and how fast the ladders fill up. If everyone plays them and the ladder is full of 99's in 3 months, they'll probably reset it. If hardly anyone plays ladder chars and the ladders aren't crowded, Bliz will probably wait longer to reset them.
What happens to Ladder Characters when the season ends?
They reset to the normal population of non-ladder characters, which is where all of your current characters are now. And any equipment they've found will become available for your current characters, and vice versa.
The second ladder season will be just like the initial one was; made up of characters who can not mix with any other characters.
V1.10 ladder chars from season one won't remain ladder characters, since that would enable twinking, turboing, etc, which would defeat the whole purpose of making ladder characters separate in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't want to keep each season of ladder characters separate, we believe, since after 6 or 9 months there might be 3 ladder seasons, and it would be confusing to have 1 or 2 groups of characters who weren't eligible for the ladder, but still couldn't mix with the pre-v1.10 characters.
It's entirely possible that Blizzard will just never reset the ladders again. After all, D2X has been out for nearly two years, and the current ladder season has gone over a year.
How will Ladder Characters be designated?
This isn't known, but likely they'll have their names in some other color on Bnet, and/or some sort of icon showing beside them.
How will Ladder games be shown?
[color=royal blue]This should be easy, since in theory ladder characters would only see ladder games, same as HC chars only see HC games now. If you typed in the name you'd get an error message like you do with HC/SC games or difficulty level requirements now.[/color]
Official v1.10 info? The following list appeared on the website for the official D2 distributor in Poland. We thought it was new, but soon learned it was an old list of hoped for changes, and not anything officially from v1.10. Read it for amusement, but don't expect anything in it to make it into the actual patch.
Major Bugs
Fixed a bug where a connection problem (I.E. "Unable to connect to Battle.net") would instead result in a downloading patch dialog that stayed at 0% indefinitely.
Fixed various "packet sniffing" exploits.
Fixed a bug that caused realm characters to not save.
Fixed a bug that enabled players to deliberately crash a realm game.
Fixed a bug where players received "Realm Down" and "Player Not Found" messages.
Fixed a bug where game crashed when weapon switch button W was pushed while the game was still loading, before entering a game.
Minor Bugs
Fixed a bug that caused game creation to fail.
Fixed a bug that caused realm games to show as full when they were not.
Baal minions no longer cause loading pauses.
Fixed a bug with the first quest in Act III that prevented the Golden Bird from dropping.
Removed "invisible islands" from various locations.
Fixed various items that were previously bugged.
Fixed a bug where Tyrael would sometimes create an inaccessible portal.
Fixed a bug that prevented monsters from dropping treasure when near an edge or an object.
Modifications
[color=sea-green]Altered stats of a few Unique and Set items*.
Added new Horadric Cube recipes.
Added three new runewords (Duress, Famine and Pattern).
Added several new rare and magic affixes.
Rare items will now always spawn with six affixes if possible.
Reduced level requirements of certain rare and magical affixes
Improved crafted items.
Lowered maximum duration for which Hirelings could be poisoned
Increased stack sizes of most Throwing weapons.
Increased the chance slightly to get Set and Unique items from Gambling.
Monsters no longer spawn near the Halls of the Dead waypoints in Act II.
Added an "invite all" button in the party screen.
"Evil Urns" now spawn in all acts.
Certain quests on multiplayer games can now be completed, for characters who have not done them, even if the character who created the game already completed them in a previous game.
Quest rewards from Akara in Act I and Ormus in Act III now have a 50% chance to give an amulet instead of a ring.
Smashing the Compelling Orb in Act III now rewards you with a rare jewel.
Quests that reward a hireling now give the option to either hire a new hireling or resurrect a dead hireling if there is one.
Items given to a character by NPCs no longer drop on the ground when the inventory is full.
Auras and Warcries no longer get terminated by weaker ones when having more than one active by different characters at the same time (For example, a level 10 Barbarian Battle Orders warcry will not cancel an active level 20 Battle Orders).
Antidote and Thawing potions now give protection for 12 seconds.
Changed "players X" command into "/players X" and added confirmation messages.
SHIFT + RIGHT-Clicking a stack of keys picks up one key.
SHIFT + RIGHT-Clicking a tome of town portal or a tome of identify picks up one scroll if there is more than one.
Killing the King in the secret level now no longer prevents characters from creating the portal.
Hostile characters now show in separate portraits on the right side of the screen showing their character class, name, and level. [/color]
Improvements
Increased the maximum number of characters that can be created per account on each realm from 8 to 14.
Each account now have one large shared item inventory per realm that can be accessed by any character of that account by pressing a second tab from the stash within the game.
You can now specify a default channel to join upon login.
The join menu now remembers the last game you entered.
Moved the "Quit" button away from the "Join" Button" in Battle.net chat to prevent accidental clicks.
Pressing ALT + PrintScrn while hovering the mouse over an item takes a screenshot of that item's hover text box.
Long character names now display in full in ladders, channels, and party screens.
Battle.net friends list whispers are now shorter and in different color.
Increased the power of the gem in chat.
The new "/friends" command can now be used within the game.
Skill Balance Changes
-Barbarian
Increased effectiveness of certain Warcries.
-Paladin
Slightly increased usefulness of certain Defensive Auras.
-Necromancer
Increased damage of Teeth, and Bone Spear.
Decreased the Mana cost for Bone Spirit and increased its damage.
Increased effectiveness of poison based skills.
Limited the maximum number of skeletons to five.
Limited the maximum number of skeletal Mages to five.
Limited the maximum number of revived monsters to five.
Increased damage and life of all summoned monsters
Increased effectiveness of certain curses.
-Sorceress
Blizzard now always hits.
-Amazon
Valkyrie speed increases per level.
Fixed Piercing of Amazon's Guided Arrow.
-Assassin
Increased damage of certain Traps skills.
Cloak of Shadows no longer causes friendly characters screens to go darker.
-Druid
Increased damage of certain Elemental Tree skills.
Attention:
[color=dark red]You can no longer equip items if you have a corpse. This prevents a common problem where all equipped items pop up and drop on the ground upon death.
Added level requirement for joining nightmare and hell difficulty games. Now, you must be level 25 or higher to join nightmare difficulty games and level 50 or higher to join hell difficulty games.
Weapon switch function no longer changes the selected skill.
A five second timer is applied before hostility takes effect.[/color]
Taken from Diabloii and BBcode / htlm edited by zethilone 
Linear Mode
