Whats the deal with ladder / non ladder?

[Alhazred]

I got this question no one seems to wanna answer.

Whats the diff between ladder and non ladder? When you create a character you check the box to go ladder, what does it do and what are the pros and cons of each?

[Dacar92]

On ladder there are items you can't get on non-ladder. On ladder, your character can go to the "top of the ladder", meaning if you are number one on the ladder, you are the player with the character with the most experience. It is a "standings" so to speak.

[purplelocust]

On ladder there are items you can't get on non-ladder. On ladder, your character can go to the "top of the ladder", meaning if you are number one on the ladder, you are the player with the character with the most experience. It is a "standings" so to speak.
Actually, I think that in classic, there aren't any items that are ladder-only. The ladder-only items I know of are some uniques and runewords but those are all in the expansion world.

The "ladder" worlds are created from scratch when Blizzard decides to do a ladder reset. The recent seasons of the ladder have begun when 1.10 came out in October 2003, then when there was a ladder reset in July 2004, and then just now- a week after 1.11 came out this August 2005, there was another reset, so we are now in "Season 3". A ladder reset doesn't delete the existing ladder characters- they are just moved into the non-ladder world. The non-ladder world is where all the characters from previous seasons are moved to and also includes all the other "old-timers" who may go back to 1.09, 1.08, etc. In the non-ladder world, there are more items from the old days floating around such as Stones of Jordan with no level requirement, for example. Those can make low-level characters significantly more powerful and most reasonable players consider playing with such items from earlier versions and so on as wimping out. So if you aren't interested in or don't have any of those items, you may want to start from scratch and play in the ladder world. Some people are bummed when the ladder is reset since they like playing with their high-level characters and great items accumulated over the years, but most of us are very excited since it is great to start out with a clean slate and build up from nothing.

[Dacar92]

Thanks for the good explanation

[Alhazred]

Yeah, certainly made it easier for me to understand.

Ladder you compete, however sooner or later its gonna get reset and you'll be thrown into non-ladder which is where all the really old chars are and some old items.

[mhl12]

for an in depth explanation on all the differences of ladder and nonladder look here: http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/basics/charactertypes.shtml