I’ve thought about this for a while and I am not quite certain how to approach it.
I don’t really have a point of disagreement per se, so much as I think that what you’re saying is true but also too early to tell how it will shake out. I mean the one major contention I have is that they’re committing to the route for the 10%. I think it’s less about the 10% and more about marketing through the professional players. Showcasing, in a sense, rather than perhaps producing content with the intent to create something truly enthralling for the rare uberachiever.
The reason I think this is because the direction that the game has drifted to has been almost 100% an understanding that players no longer play these types of games by themselves. There’s a guide for it and you can literally be the showcase person by just copying them. Tier 4 no longer being inspirational is not because players got better but because the playerbase itself is no longer bound to their own wit. If you can’t figure out how to get to some ridiculous level by yourself you’re a few clicks away from the answer.
It’s evolved into a test with a clear set of real answers that you can just take. You can even know how far a build will go without so much as trying it out due to Maxroll etc. + have recorded demos on how to run the thing.
I mean I agree that the game is in disarray but I also understand why. What was released as 1.0 the majority of the playerbase rejected. What makes discussion about this particular game so hard is that 1.0 and 2.0 are so different. They are not the same game at all. In every sense of the word they’re not really comparable. They upended all equipment. They upended all items. They practically destroyed their original end-game and shoehorned in a new one. I can’t really see them having a vision after 2.0 because it proved that the original vision and path was just not going to ever work; they’re in development with us now because just 6 months ago they had to tear it all out and start again.
But the last thing I want to touch on is Leaderboards. Leaderboards are always toxic to a game, period. They never do anything but create rankings that are majorly flawed because the measurements themselves are unstable. However, setting aside the metrics of leaderboards being statistically useless one of the major flaws here is that in Diablo 4 specifically there’s no separating function for leaderboards to work.
What makes an iARPG leaderboard work is the rarity of the items and the difficulty of acquisition. Diablo 4 has no rare items and nothing is difficult to acquire. I think this is actually what is driving away this 10% if you will; it isn’t that the game is not challenging, because it doesn’t matter how challenging it is per se, but that there’s no edge in the competition itself. You and the idiot who couldn’t build something to get past level 20 by themselves are always on the same footing. Your build, no matter how original or brilliant you are, will be copied to the point where you may actually lose 1st place by someone getting fortunate and having a tenth of a second less than you on some random run.
Because there is no differentiation in the playerbase and there is no sufficient randomization in the pathing your leaderboards have zero value. I do play a number of these types of games that do have leaderboards and have in the past and the more deterministic (lower the rarity / better the odds) and higher the attrition (“perseverance > cleverness”) the more useless the metrics. I assure you that the only leaderboard value will be “First”. That’s it. The first person will be the only one worth discussing but otherwise there’s no movement value because as I said the people who can show up at the top can literally be bottom players who just copied a guide.
It’s also why I don’t really agree with rebranding T4 as anything. The gatekeeper is dead. Maxroll killed him.