I was actually wondering… to cut down on the disappointment and/or agitation of dying in hardcore (especially to things like lag, ddos, etc)
Maybe making it so hardcore characters are transitioned to normal mode… so that you can continue to play the character after death if you want… just not in the hardcore setting. (Much like Path of Exile has where the hardcore players character is no longer hardcore after dying)
This would ensure that hardcore was still exclusive to those that did not yet die… (making high level and progression/gear still MEAN something), while still giving the players the character to play that they put (in many cases) hundreds of hours into.
In a perfect world I would not recommend this… but I know MANY players that are GOOD at hardcore (ranking very highly every season) and WANT to play hardcore but because of random bugs in zones, and lag deaths etc, they have moved to softcore (normal mode). If they were protected from losing their character with the fallback plan of playing on softcore after the death… they would be more inclined to play hardcore from the start, which in turn gives the players in hardcore more people to group/trade/play with.
Just my 2 cents.
2 Likes
happens, my friend. That is life. And that is Hardcore (HC) mode in a nutshell. In a perfect world, there would be no power outages, internet disconnections, or DDOS attacks. But in a perfect world, no one would get angry or upset over a random event that was entirely out of their control; they would simply move on. And that is pretty much all we can choose to do, both in life and in HC mode.
As a longtime HC player, I have no use whatsoever for a “softcore” character. And my advice to someone who wants to try HC mode would be: If you cannot accept the fact that the game will not ask for your permission before it kills your hero (whether in battle or to a disconnect), then you should avoid HC mode. Because the experience is diminished almost to the point of redundancy once you have removed the aspect of permanent death.
HC mode is not intended to be played by children – or adults who have the emotional stability of children, for that matter. Many of us have dealt with personal loss in our lives and are able to put the loss of some character in a video game into perspective. Again, happens, my friend. So we can get over it and go back to having fun!
3 Likes
I think even the most mature adults get angry or upset when losing loved ones due to random events. I don’t think that makes the world less perfect, even if we all must move on eventually. Losing a D3 character is not close to losing a loved one, of course, but the premise that we should emotionlessly accept random negative events is faulty.
I like working toward large goals, and I like knowing that failure is a possibility. Death to lag isn’t failure, though. Death to lag is your 6 year old and his friend demolishing your painstakingly crafted scale model days before its completion. Death to lag is a tour bus driving onto a curb and demolishing your guitar an hour before you open for your favorite band. Death to lag is coming down with mono the morning of the biggest test of your life.
Death to lag happens, but losing your hard work because of reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself sucks. Full stop.
When playing PoE I just basically deleted the characters once they went to normal. Kept a couple characters around for testing purposes, but that was about it.
I think for a lot of HC players they just see the transfer to normal mode as pointless and they are unlikely to ever play those characters and just delete them.
So don’t think it’s any benefit to most HC players.
2 Likes
Having my character being moved from Hardcore to Normal does not feel good to me.
I would not like it and probably scratch it.
I used to play both normal and HC in D2 and it happend to lose a character to a power outage as well as to some crash.
I didn’t do that in the latest chapter of the saga ( actually I’m trying it out right now, as an experiment) because it felt like Blizzard just added all the troubles that an online only game brings with it (lags, disconnections, etc) without anything to compensate for it.
Losing a character after spending so much time on it it’s frustrating, more so if it’s not your fault.
I play to relax and have fun, not to get more stress.
Playing HC with the constant fear of lags and such is just a step too far for me, I don’t enjoy it, so I didn’t play it.
I fear D4 will face the same issues regarding HC, which is disappointing since it feels like a punishment.
Just my 2 cents, I know other players who enjoy it the way it is.
edit: lol, I just lost my HC character due to a bad save on servers and had to start anew. I brought it upon myself 
Since Diablo 4 is even more “online” than Diablo 3 is I expect more deaths from “lag/server issues” than there was in Diablo 3.
Essentially hardcore will be a gamble that you can’t account for instead of a risk you can count on like it’s supposed to be. So essentially if it’s true and characters end up dying from lag/server issues in D4, then D4 is easily the worst diablo game of all.
Some people only like to play hardcore. Diablo Immortal doesn’t even have hardcore which sucks.
If you don’t want death to be meaningful, just don’t play hardcore. But stop trying to soften it for the rest of us.