Yeah, I wish I could choose to fight Legions and World Bosses alone, especially the first time. (Technically, already possible with Asheeva, but only in the campaign, and only once per character.)
But still, the game can be played almost entirely single-player.
Back to the topic :
There seems to be a lot of D3 players with amnesia here.
D3 too was released both to critical acclaim and «in terrible state».
D3 too had major changes in its first years :
Oh yeah, do I remember that !
Before «Loot 2.0» that mentioned that Increased Attack Speed affixes would be nerfed I actually bought a bunch of max IAS items on the Real Money Auction House (using gold I had accumulated, not real money).
Naively I thought that old items wouldn’t have been touched !
Though, that’s more on me - while the first main issue with this thread seems to be that D4 devs made the mistake of promising that they wouldn’t do this… and they did it anyway ?!
Speaking of «Loot 2.0», it was released about a month before the expansion, so frequent major updates shaking up items if the first few years after release aren’t new either.
Oh, and D3 didn’t even have seasons at that point (they came after the release of the expansion), so it’s a mistake to assume this wouldn’t be an issue without D4 having seasons.
It isn’t about D4 being live service either : IMHO players should be fully aware that no game is «finished» before all the expansion packs were released (and it doesn’t matter how the «Eternal» game mode is called), and should fully expect that their characters might get «bricked» at any moment.
(And this is even before considering the issue of power creep rendering even untouched items worthless after a while, which is unfortunate, but has to be expected.)
The second major issue here, that has hardly been pointed out, is how this would hardly be an issue if D4 wasn’t online-only. For instance with D2 you can run whatever version of the game you wand, whenever you want ! People even made tools to be able to easily switch from version to version (most mods don’t support all versions, and often not even the latest one), though I prefer to keep it simple and just use one game folder per version. There would be no gnashing of teeth about «bricked» characters/items when you could easily load a version of the game where your character/item isn’t «bricked» !
But then this is on us, we can’t claim we weren’t warned about D3 and D4 being online-only games.
Also, I’m going to tentatively make a wilder claim, and say that a live service game doesn’t have to mean online-only. Someone else already pointed out a mostly offline game that works that way, one which even inspired Diablo 1 (with most of the inspiration unrealized, D1 never got around selling physical disks with randomized loot(boxes)) : Magic the Gathering. (It does have dozens of different softwares too, some of the official ones being online-only.)
Finally (but IMHO offtopic) there have been multiple claims here about respective player numbers of Eternal/Seasonal, and how much money Blizzard makes from them.
Well, first, maybe if you don’t actually have any numbers, please stop with the wild guesses ?
Second, arguably most of the D4 players are playing «neither» : they are playing the campaign (and not even finishing it) :
[This used to be a link to the Steam achievements for D4, but I guess I cannot post outside links yet… despite my Battle.net account dating back to 1998 or so !]
30% completed the campaign
36% got at least one character to lvl 50
Now, annoyingly these are numbers starting from S2 when D4 released on Steam, and not S0, but if anything, I would expect the Battle.net ones to be even lower : D4 had a massive[1] marketing campaign, so a lot of extremely casual[2] players would have played it. Even despite the high starting price. Those that claim that D4 is a «seasonal(-only) game» would do well to remember that.
[1] [This used to be a link to the infamous «Welcome to hell, New York» Times Square ad, bathed in orange light from Helltides forest fires in Canada]
[2] [This used to be a link to PC Gamer’s « Master of horror John Carpenter doesn’t ‘need to see’ the Borderlands film, may have quit Diablo 4 for the same reason he dropped Red Dead 2: ‘I can’t even get on that horse’» article]
(D4 devs really shot themselves in the foot when they made the quest say that the horse was a «reward from Donan», but it only actually being given to the player long after the «Donan Act» (Act 4-ish instead of 2.)
And before you say «but that’s in the past, and don’t you mean that these players aren’t coming back anyway ?», I also would expect that most of the players buying the (quite pricey !) expansion are going to be in that «campaign-only, not even with all characters» category. Being those players that played D4 on release and that’s it, returning for the continuation of the campaign.
And I would expect we get more than one expansion, so this phenomenon of a massive influx (and then reflux) of players to happen several times. (You know, just like seasons, but on a much larger scale.)
But I guess some of you might have been thinking about player-hours instead (which is what you would indirectly see when looking at any number of «currently playing» players).
If D4 was a free2play game I would have said that, yes, it’s probably unfair to consider a player stopping after 20 hours «as much» as a player stopping after 2000, but D4 is not F2P, they did pay a full game price.
But even for F2P, considering a 2000 hours player «as much» as a hundred 20 hours players is unfair too.
Your actual «typical player» is probably somewhere between these two extremes of counting per-player and averaging over player-hours ?