I wanted to try the multiplayer today, but the problem is: Battle.Net is a mess. As soon as I enter BNET, it's simply impossible to distinguish a single word - but strangely, the rest of the interface looks fine. Does anybody have the same problem?

The text is rendered on top of the graphics by Windows using Times New Roman, so if there are any issues with that on your system then that would be the issue. On top of that Diablo does a poor job of communicating where to render things.

Where you looking to play with friends or strangers?

https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX
let's you play multiplayer easier than ever, only host has to port forward and next version will have zerotier support, which will let you play with strangers with literally 0 port forwarding, games will be just a few clicks away :)

The point was to play with strangers, and try the multiplayer aspect of the game which totally eluded me back in the days.

I have no idea with Windows would fail to display Times New Roman - I'm a writer, so Windows fonts certainly wasn't the aera where I was expecting to find problems.

Some app overlay interrupt game window. Known bug. Also there is some apps that looks like no overlay - but they did interrupt games windows. GOG support site mention LogiOptions.exe (or any others tools from mouse\KB\gamepads drivers+tools packages)

I'm happy to let you know that this is now possible in the latest version of DevilutionX via Public ZeroTier games :) It is both safer and simpler then ever and supports both Hellfire and Diablo.

i am having the same issue. the screen pops are there for battle.net but there are no words displayed. people keep saying there is a fix but never post it. i don't have logoptions.exe, i have razer stuff, so does that interrupt it?
i did disable all razer services but to no avail. does nvidia do something that makes it unplayable?

Earlier posters have advocated using DevilutionX, an open-source reimplementation of Diablo. DevilutionX is claimed not to be affected. I have no experience with it as to whether it is or is not affected.

I can't really help with the original client since it requires Windows and the issues seams specific to it (I don't run Windows). But you probably have a better chance of finding a game using DevilutionX any way. From what I can see there are on average 3 people that logs in to Bnet per day across multiple regions. With DevilutionX there are roughly 10 users online at any given time (9 right now) and usually a few (2 atm) active games. Over the past month 3149 players logged in via DevilutionX.

The fix for missing text is to use the original client, without DX wrapper from the GOG client or other similar mods.

With DX wrapper, you can still connect to bnet. You won't see texts, but you can click the interface buttons and create/join games. In-game the interface is no longer messed up. To make it work, it requires copying files and changing Windows registry entries, posted many years ago here: https://www.gog.com/forum/diablo/diablo_1_battle_net_empty_text_boxes/page2

But as stated above, it's pointless to play D1 via Battlenet. There's less players than on DevilutionX.