TZs were designed to make the journey to 99 more accessible, not to make the race to ladder boards faster
The journey to level 99 is a celebrated experience for players and quite the milestone if achieved—a rite of passage, even. We want to offer an alternative to repeatedly farming Baal, Diablo, or Nihlathak. We also want the journey to level 99 to be accessible to a larger population of players, full of variety, and most importantly, challenging—this is where Terror Zones come in.
Somewhat interesting of a read, no real solid numbers. If he had posted 4 million would we believe that too? Not that I think that’s the case or know that it is. But it isn’t like he compared them to NL or SP cuz obviously there are no stats there. With only 5 million copies sold, counting 500k players with major room for error, only 6days after ladder started makes me wonder. It certainly however could be true that only 500k players are on ladder.
I don’t like using potentially wrong numbers to make an argument especially because most people aren’t just one thing. Play early ladder for fun, keep good chars on NL for PvP, mess around on SP when players 8 games die out on ladder. People are spread out. I do think that ladder is one of the driving forces of the game, but I"m not sure about the stats posted.
Torch running was always universal?
Largely correct. But we could just go look at the game list for NL and Ladder and that shows that ladder is the most popular. Same for HC vs SC. Again I really don’t want to draw some massive conclusion based off false numbers. NL + Ladder + SP all server a purpose.
Since it will make leveling to 99 easier ladder race will absolutly be faster. That was whole point of imolementing terror zones lol.
I think its not essy to get any good statistics as many players playladder, pvp nonladder, sometimes hardcore, even doing grails offline. So it would be impossible to put many players under one category. How many accounts are real players vs bots?
But yeah if you go look and see 2 games on game list while other mod has 30 , its pretty telling 
now you just making up stuff
were not designed with ladder race in mind
uber tristram was ladder and non ladder
? So they are ladder exclusive, and you are saying they werent designed for ladder? Come on dude, seriously? 
Ok then, its ancient history, i was pretty sure it started on ladder but i will believe you.
“Ladder exclusives are…” are spice of the game 
you seem to not understand what happened
2.5 ptr presentation had no mention about TZs being ladder only
we came to this conclusion bc of Pez and his communication skills
so which one is right? 2.5 ptr patch notes or pez?
Pez i guess but we should see this week where they give us more info and patch notes, i hope today.
Oh please don’t have any faith in Pez or any of them. They talk and talk but only the most random of things gets done. They literally dangle carrots in front of everyone, but the carrot isn’t even real, it is a potential carrot, a carrot placeholder, that they might decide they have time to do anything in the future.
I wasn’t sure was never really a NL player, only when it came to duels to be honest and I wasn’t even a big time dueler.
Man do I miss uber leveling.
In many Discord forums where I am in, the mayoriti of players play in non ladder
thats just wrong… i dont always want to play ladder… yet i played ladder because for the longest time required runewords like fort for any melee build were “ladder only”
now “terror zones” are ladder only.
granted i would play ladder next season anyways but as someone who loves NL too and like to go back to my NL characters and finish them.
this still pisses me off
Sounds like you needed to broaden your trading options. Even on legacy D2 mandatory ladder play wasn’t required to obtain those items.
Here’s how they could get near mandatory ladder participation either from desire or future value of those items:
Ladder only collaborations with other games. Select gear skins from Warcraft and StarCraft for a handful of unique or runeword items that can only obtained or made from a single ladder season, and never available in non-ladder and successive ladders.
If that experiment goes well, maybe findable/earnable exclusive character skins from those games as well that can only be obtained for one ladder season and never again.
That would be the most sure fire way to guarantee participation, even by me.
i enjoy making my own runewords most of the time.
it also a hell of a lot less fun if u find a rune like “Lo” which is used in a ton of awesome runewords but now is next to worthless becuase all those rw’s are ladder only.
but now with terror zones its even worse… i cant even enjoy CONTENT.
For sure. Though, I understand using runewords and cube recipes as a way to entice players. I’m completely in agreement about not being okay with a game play/world changing content being restricted to ladder only. That would be a first, and bad precedent to set.
I agree, ladder only enhanced leveling is not good. This means that if you want level 99 players (within a more reasonable time) but are on full character slots, you will need to delete your existing characters (and toss your gear because you have no space), or maybe wait to play 5+ months for TZ to possibly extend to non-ladder.
Ladder only content keeps this game alive!
ladder only just shows that the ladder it self is lame
Which discord names? Big ones?