So I have to say, I am quite surprised that blizzard took the 6 month poll results as a good reason to create the new limit for ladder seasons. Considering the amount of logic the average person who still plays D2 puts into an online forum thread, trusting the poll results might not have been well thought through on the staff end, and blatantly wasn't on the player end.

One word sums up why this was a terrible idea in so many ways. Trading. Players who want to play the game to the fullest (which means Ladder play considering many runewords won't work in NL without having them brought over from a reset) CANNOT effectively play, farm items via "Magic Find Runs", and then successfully trade. By the time a player who is NOT using third party programs has a MF character that can handle the monsters, which have been buffed since .10, They now need to spend LOTS of time farming items to finally trade with. By the time they have items actually worth trading (considering with all the item releases since .10, most of the items found are completely useless/wortheless) they are already at least a month into the game, EVEN FARTHER if they actually tried to HAVE FUN and make a character that was meant for killing mobs / owning with friends.

So we have 1-2months of progress, mixed with the fact that most players do NOT just so happen to start d2 (for first time or come back after a long break) within a few days after the patch. Now you have all your people starting off fresh accounts, finally getting a MF character geared and have a few trading items and GUESS WHAT! YOU CAN'T TRADE ANYTHING BECAUSE THE RESET IS 2 MONTHS AROUND THE CORNER!!

I literally have 3 IRL friends that I got to start playing again, and even with me GIVING them all the items needed to gear MF characters, by the time they found any decent trading items, they are now worth nothing and can't even find buyers for the incredibly low price tags that items now have.

Heck even I just found an ethreal arreats and was so psyched as I have never come across one on my own means of MF runs before, and guess what. It's literally useless. The Zod rune needed to make indestructible ALONE costs more then the helm is worth now. The item is literally un-sellable.

I understand that it was a vote, and a certain option won said vote, but you know darn well that not a single person was planning on quitting if you didn't change the reset time to such a short period, whereas the 3 people I convinced to re-install and start D2 back up are literally regretting even wasting the time installing the game since it's resetting in a month.