When will the new season (season 18) start?

One month is plenty of time.

And Blizz was not specific about S17 end date so they could possibly extend S17 to 5 months like they did S16 halfway through.

Not yet.

For those of you who are new or are otherwise unaware, we typically announce the end of a Season at least two weeks prior to the end of said Season. Before that, there will be a preview for the next Season both in blog form and in the form of a one-week PTR for testing.

I don’t have an ETA to provide for when that will be arriving for 18, but I’ll leave it as something I’m actively working on. :wink:

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As a longtime D3 player, we tend to get a little restless around the two month mark of a season. (We speculate if there is enough time to test in the ptr, field questions for the next season buff, or other things)

There are many things that happen within a gaming company, so I will try to be patient and respectful. Thank you to Nevalistis and everyone else that has made the forum transition smooth!:sunglasses:

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I’m glad. I searched google and came up with TBD at season 18. I’m curious why season end isn’t set or known. Why are the season lengths variable for each season?

You have plenty of time…

The short answer is because development cycles can vary.

The longer answer has a lot of explanation, but I’ll try to focus on the beefier challenges. Diablo III is supported on PC, Mac, and all current generation consoles. That’s five separate release clients and four network platforms (three of which are external partners) that need to be tested and sometimes re-generated and re-submitted if there are any issues. Localization also takes time, as we’re supported in 13 different languages. We avoid patch cycles occurring during active Seasons so that any game changes that happen, even if they’re just gameplay optimizations, don’t impact players who compete on the Leaderboards.

We still, generally, target an estimated 3 months per Season (and we’ve stuck pretty close to that, though last patch had some unexpected issues that required us to push the Season back). Ultimately if we have to make a choice between a Season running a little long or getting the extra time to make sure changes are thoroughly tested and the patch is as high quality as possible, we’re going to err on the latter.

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Cheers Nev for jumping in to communicate with us. Please fee free (actually don’t do that Free is a barb and he may not like it :wink: ) to keep up the comms lines. Silence is never good.

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Aha, this is why small numerical changes take so long, like buffing an item from 300% to 500%, or adding an extra hydra?

Should have put that together. I figured all the platforms would draw from the same data source.

I’ll certainly be doing my best, but I also have a lot to juggle. If anything, I’ll try to focus most of my engagement and posting efforts around PTRs and patch release cycles. I don’t ever want to be totally absent, but sometimes certain times of the year (cough BlizzCon cough) or having a lot of other projects on my plate can result in limiting my post count.

If anything, I want to make sure I’m not only ever here to make an announcement or say something official. That’s part of the job, but Community Managers should feel just as much a part of the community as the average player, and that means I should post fun or casual things from time to time too!

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Take as long as you need, but make sure to push those barb recommendations please :P. Time make Free happy for his effort all these years. (And other barbs too @@)

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Sounds good to me, bring it.:+1:

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Speaking of patches and PTR, will there be a PTR prior to S18?

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Nevalistis confirmed this earlier in this very thread…

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Managed to miss that bit.

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Probably late to this, but I just realized that you can like blue posts now.

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Of course you can vote on blue posts now that it’s only possible to up-vote them.

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Consent is key. Please ask before you touch your friendly neighborhood Free.

I, for one, certainly appreciate your recent presence here on the forums, and I suspect I’m far from alone in that sentiment. In the past, it often feels that a given forum’s most important topics go completely unnoticed, and the communication between posters and CMs is threadbare. Even a quick acknowledgement goes a long way!

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope we see more of you here on the forums going forward! Don’t be a stranger! :smiley:

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We can’t flag them, though.

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I can flag anything. Look… :uk:

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That just means I can’t be a country. No flag, no country.

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