Just in case the intent of this thread gets lost and someone from Blizzard happens to read up on it…
On Tuesday, November 17, console players were given the option to create Season 22 characters. Rather than saying “Season Ended” in the character selection screen, it stated “Season 22 in Progress”.
While I knew about the date of the 20th, this is my first time playing Diablo III on console. I thought maybe the date was different for console so I went ahead and claimed my weekly Challenge Rift cache with my newly created Season 22 character. I probably played for a few hours and then came back to play again, at which point, I continuously received the message “Season ending in 1 minute,” for about… 10 minutes.
It took some time, but my newly created Season 22 character was converted into a non-Seasonal character.
As a software engineer, I think it’s fair to say that there was an error on Blizzard’s part here to allow for people to create characters. Some people are claiming that people were trying to “exploit” the system by getting a head start on Season 22. That was not my own intent when I started the Season 22 character yesterday.
I also think it’s fair for Blizzard to reset the cache for the week for those of us that claimed the cache on a Season 22 character. While I’m seeing claims of “you know the date that it was announced, you should have waited,” let’s be honest here and say that’s an assumption.
The facts we know are that a software mechanism wrongly allowed people to start Season 22 and that people started playing a Season 22 character because it was offered.
At the end of the day, I would ask Blizzard’s dev team to [1] look into what happened as to avoid a timing mistake and [2] to be fair to the affected customers (possibly by resetting cache claims).