We all saw what happened with D2R. If the game was in Early Access right now instead being released prematurely that chaos wouldn’t be there on release.
Diablo 4 needs to avoid such mess on release since it would drastically influence its sales in a negative way long term and the solution to this is doing an Early Access.
Based on Blizzards track record we all know the D4 launch is going to be a disaster either way.
Early Access is an illusion.
If they make one year Early Access the game could get polished pretty good for the release so that all major bugs are out and playing online isn’t a problem.
The other option is to have a buggy release and a reset of the progression at some future point. That would push many players out.
Indeed. When was the last time Blizzard did early access for anything anyway?
It will be weird and worrisome if everything goes smooth at launch for Blizzard. It may lead even bigger and unforeseen disaster that we don’t want to experience. 
By company policy, studios don’t do “crowdfunding” stuff to retain their fame about professional game development studio. Bugs would always happen but early access simply risking the integrity of the game. When developers have to patch a game breaking exploit, they need to rewind the progress of exploit abusing players instead of banning them outright or reset the progress on everything.
A rushed game is always a bad game. According that rheoteric, when they demand money from fans without proper handling of a title, company would see such mistakes as lost customer potential with demanding investors asking questions about why stock raised so low under their expectations and they’re ought to pay bonuses to their employees just for that too. Why do you think crunch culture exists?
I think the glorious days of zero day games are long gone now. Diablo 4 already gonna be monetized heavily to support the game down the road. Expect a release date first before talking about Early Access, perhaps at the next quarterly update. Considering it’s around beta phases now and there’s not a reliable release date yet, it still would take 2 years at least.
Diablo 4 would benefit from an Early Access right now. A great deal of bugs would be fixed for 2 years of players testing.
But for who? When I see D3 PTR, a lot of players can “play” PTR, and they just grind GR, without no return about the patch. Just spend x xxx (maybe xx xxxxx) blood sharks, finish the PTR session with full primal builds and… Nothing about the the patch
Whatever happens with the D4 launch I hope it is not a mess the way D2R was. Having the servers overwhelmed at D3s launch was one thing but D2R might still be in beta. A lot of people now want refunds.
I asked about this situation on the D2R forum and was labeled a D2 hater by one of the trolls that comes to this forum. Funny how that works. 
They can’t even launch a season without issues, crashes, bugs, and errors… My motto for blizz is:
Prepare for the worst. Hope for the… Meh…
But of course they’ll do. I warned multiple times on these forums that D2R is a money grab - an unfinished product with potential critical issues for the user.
If I had bought the game I’d now demand a refund on 100%.
The new woke Blizzard is going to ruin D4 anyway. Why even have hope for it?
The biggest thing that’ll help Diablo 4 imo, is making sure it’s not rushed to be released. Still interested in the next blog whenever (or if) we get it.
Even if D4 is delayed to 2030 that won’t make it bug free on launch. To make it bug free you need proper testing aka Early Access.
There’ll be problems (big or small) regardless of when the game’s released. That’s how it is with online games (at least I’ve never seen an online game with a smooth launch, especially when it has a sizable amount of hype to it). However, as long as those problems aren’t gamebreaking and are quickly fixed (as in not taking months), then I don’t see a problem with a few issues popping up at the game’s launch.
Rushing however practically ensures plenty of gamebreaking bugs, so yeah, they can take their time.
Public testing is not proper testing, just check every PTR we have ever had. Proper testing would be actually spending money in house to have people test specific aspects the developers want testing. Blizz isn’t going to do that, so D4 will be launched with bugs regardless if the beta testing is one week, one month, one year. Besides, it is going to be hard to find people willing to grind on testing for free for an entire year.
As far as the opening night crashes and queues, they are going to happen regardless. Just like an airline overbooks flights, Blizz’s opening night is going to be massively overbooked. If they sell 20 million licenses preorder, they know a week in less than a million players are going to be playing at one time, so their servers are going to be set up to handle 2 million. Opening night, 19 million players are going to show up. They aren’t going to invest in enough servers to handle that volume when they know they will only have 5% of that after the opening weekend.
Don’t think that’s as much as important as making the combat/gameplay right this time
Think there needs to be a bit of revamp regarding some topics, most of which probably are:
Itemisation (more specific but still generic, something like: Projectiles do 50% more damage vs blind targets, as opposed to Blinded targets take 10% more damage)
Inventory (have this idea to have a separate/quick inventory for quick in-battle swap of weaponry, for example Root with a wand or staff, swap to Axe for bleed, and then Hammer for a super high damage knockback-bleed effect kind of thing…)
Skill-Trees (this is kinda hard to explain but don’t just “depend” the skills on the tree, make some of impact still remain in gear, something like: +25% projectile speed/damage vs +25% cast speed/range being gained by gear as opposed to by “build”)
Elites (instead of what they do, present us what they’re resilient against, say an elite is super resilient to physical damage, put a “Red status” (indicating super high resistance) icon with “shield + broken sword” next to it above so we know we need to reduce that “Red” status down to “Orange” and then “Yellow” eventually to be able to kill it with physical damage, if we have armor-removal attacks/skills), and maybe some debuffs/curses
Verticality (not sure how but think this aspect is super underrated, imagine fighting on a lower floor whilst archers or flyers shoot from up above and your main goal is to gain “vertical cover” for a shelter, those kinds of things IMO would increase dynamic/playability drastically, and probably make players “practice” some more “advanced” concepts of combat skills)
Those 4 are kinda in my “focus” lately and think need a revamp, not just on D more generally on a whole-genre level, i.e. don’t need be “bombarded” by resistant to X type mobs in order to “extract” combat dynamics and difficulty. Instead the game can impose some skill-based challenges by how well you combo stuff or how well can a one fight in a more environment/hazardous space maybe)
There will be people for that. Diablo is a very popular brand.
They can always organize that with ques if IT is the only problem although the server problem for D4 will be bigger than D2 not only because of the bigger player base, but also because of the structure of the game allowing for more players interacting together in-game.
It will be a grim launch for sure, but Early Access will at least safeguard it against critical bugs and huge down-times.
They rushed D2R instead of making it Early Access and solve all the issues before release. Now they have to learn from that mistake and do an Early Access for D4.
Are people really that interested in paying to beta test?