Ladder seasons are pretty lame IMO. But in the past new items /runewords would come with the ladder as incentive to play. While I liked what I saw during the beta weekend unless we were playing a much different build than the team is internally Im not feeling too confident about how ready for release the game will be. The fact we couldnt play the whole game, 2 classes werent playable. Seems like a lot to still work on in a mere month. The fact that the game wont have a ladder season on launch also shows they know internally things wont be ready for a fair ladder out the gate.
This is in no way bashing the team working on it. But a little transparency would be welcomed when we are coming off war3 reforged fiasco. My plans right now is wait till the first season. Play a ton, after the season ends if I continue to play it will be non seasonal as i really dont give a damn about a leader board and the seasonal reset i find to be bad tedious gameplay which creates a huge disconnect between you and your characters. So I will continue working on my character so I can know him, remember him. And if perhaps we get a secondary set of servers to play a version of diablo2 with true end game vs just farming baal over and over 6000+ times then i might dip back into another season.
The beta was so people could have a little taste of the game. I remember the beta for Diablo 3 back when that released was only up to the Skeleton King, which is less than an act, although I do think you could play all the classes in that
It was primarily for a last round of functionality testing, like what I did this last weekend. Sure, anyone that preordered got in and could just play, but they specifically wanted feedback on the controller and KB/M UI functionality. Good thing too, since they screwed up a couple things on KB/M and controller usefulness is only about 60% of what it should be.
The last time rune words were added to the game was v1.11, which was the 3rd ladder reset, which was summer of 2005. Those added rune words were on single player as well, so no incentive there. The first reset was fall 2003. Within those 1.5 years of first ladder to third ladder, new rune words were added twice.
The 27th reset was Dec 2020. That’s 15 years and 25 resets later. 2010 The Diablo 2 Battlechest was the 11th highest selling game of that year–Ubers, no rune words.
