It seems to me Blizzard has put all their eggs in a one basket…Softcore Seasons. They have gutted and shafted the eternal realms twice; I’m not even going to bother playing those characters anymore, because I can’t trust them not to gut it again. They don’t seem to care in the least about hardcore. They implement so many insta-death mechanics, many on hardcore players don’t even bother playing some of the content and their server lag is killing more characters that actually playing. I’ve lost 3 characters, two died from lag (one was just riding a mount) and one from my playing. It’s kind of incredible to believe with all the advancements in game tech they haven’t bothered to implement a system to differentiate between a lag death and player death. They have the escape scroll, already monitor ping and virtually every other aspect of the game. Why not add the ability to recover a character killed by lag. HC is virtually dead, the economy is anemic, because who wants to trade for high value items in this playing environment?
The game is struggling to keep their player base, sure they are making money on new sales, but their player retention is not good. So, their answer is to ignore and shaft 2/3 of the game and focus only on SC seasons, which many players get bored half-way through. Come on Blizz stop shafting the eternal realm and give HC some love.