Now when I say not last long, sure. It’ll last few decades but not in its current state, it’ll throw off players and lose 90% of the playerbase probably by the end of the year if not sooner, and then will have its long time player hold outs who’ll stick with it no matter what…but would you?
Issue #1
Come the first season, and people who never played before and realize that all that hard work they’ve put in on the eternal realm is ultimately going to be somewhat meaningless when the new season realms come out and you have to do it all again if you want to earn those season rewards and battle passes, because this is D4s angle - to push out 3 to 4 seasons a year…most likely 4 seasons to shovel the battle pass cosmetics which ultimately are somewhat meaningless, since the lack of ‘shiny’ weapons…100% straight up, the battle pass cosmetics will focus on glowing weapon transmogs.
Consider what these cosmetics are going to be, New horses…horse accessory which nobody will see, glowing weapons? Glowing armor? If anyone has been getting KFC codes and has the KFC transmog sets, they are really not that good at all. So as someone mentioned, what happens when Blizzard learns its battlepass method isn’t working, and nobody is buying…would you trust Blizzard to keep its word and not make the passes P2W? Haha, yeah - we’ll see, but truthfully looking at its past history, I’d be worried about that.
So what’ll happen, the first mass exodus will happen when the casuals and people new to the Diablo franchise will be forced to start again, sure you ‘can’ continue on the eternal realm but, that’ll become a ghost town as the majority of remaining players change to the new realm for the season, and start from level 1 again to repeat the exact same grind everyone is doing now, with the added bonus of at least having an objective. I say mass exodus of players, because this is exactly whats happened with D3’s first season and D2Rs first season, it has traditionally caused a significant player drop off and I have no doubts it’ll happen in D4 as well. This is 100% guaranteed as the population will diverge, eternal will lose a lot of players so getting groups, even doing things like legions and world bosses will become harder…and harder.
Issue #2
Incoming serious rogue nerfs, Blizzard has nerfed so many potential builds from ice blade sorcs to necro minions, and yet left the rogue mostly alone sure they did a ‘minor’ nerf with TB’s cooldowns but the class is still so far ahead of all the other classes, its not even funny anymore. Anyone who has levelled multiple classes, then changed to rogue fully well knows how much better in almost every department they are vs the other classes, sure they have a few minor issues mostly with CC but other classes don’t fair that much better either.
Rogues basically are S+++ tier classes, easy to gain move speed buffs which with items can make the class move almost as fast as a horse!! Not even joking, flurry is OP and can blow up a room whilst literally healing at the same time, TWISTED BLADES enough said about that, but another thing which makes the class excel is how energy works, since you are always naturally regenerated energy without actually attacking unlike other classes…but the time you have destroyed a pack of monsters, your energy has most likely fully regenerated and you’re good to go again, whilst other classes don’t have that luxury at all and are forced to use basic attacks to open, not rogues who can go straight into unleashing, now - you may say why nerf the rogue? Because Blizzard isn’t going to buff the other classes to be on par with the class, so what do you think will happen at S1 launch and people roll new characters? Rogues…rogues everywhere, with maybe a few druids thrown in but the majority will be rogues, so blizzard will be left with the choice of either nerfing the class hard to make it more appealing to play other classes, or buff the other classes to be on par with the rogue…what do you think is going to happen? Minor buffs are just not going to cut it and we all know that.
Issue #3
Lack of meaningful content post-game, once you have beat lilith and you reached mostly around level 50, this is basically when the game starts to decline significantly because of major XP exploits being patched, the player is left with limited choices moving forward. Helltides and Nightmare dungeons, the average player here is solo, heck even in a full group its not like XP falls from the sky now, so the grind to 100 is significant and boring, this is once again - going to cause people to get bored and move on to different games, FF16 is next week, PoE2 is soon and Starfield in a few months just to name 3 titles that will 100% affect player population levels.
I think the levelling strategy for D4 is wrong, entirely wrong. They should have adopted the traditional method of having to beat the entire story from scratch to unlock higher world tiers, this would give players more of a challenge and significant XP which would bypass some of the monotony of rush clearing NMDs.
And as you get all the exploiters who are all level 100 crying for content, Blizzard panics and what happens next? Raids? Uber Bosses? Content starts coming out for the select minority of players and the rest get nothing unless they buckle up and reach those high levels and gear up with perfect rolled legendaries, but again - in the grand scale of things…all seasonal characters end up on the defunct eternal realm eventually, why even have the eternal realm at the end of the day because your not earning any seasonal items or levelling your battlepass on eternal period, so at the end of the day…its near meaningless unless you are fine with repeating the same content every 3 months over and over again.
Issue #4
Itemization is horrible, perhaps the worst in any diablo game and the uniques? The uniques are horrible, absolute trash baring just a few. Where are the meaningful uniques? I know the devs have withheld set items, but man - the uniques are something to be proud of, especially farming BIS uniques but in D4, they are so underwhelming that its a travesty and something that needs to desperately needs to change, not to mention the absolute lazy approach with adding just 1/4th or even 1/5th the amount of unique items of Diablo 2.
Heck, the itemization in general is extremely lazy with like just 75 different (static) items, I get the fact its a live service and will keep adding…and adding new stuff but lets be real, the player population now vs 1 year+ time will be extremely different, D4 will keep losing players, sales and major content patches might temporary bring some players back but the trend will be a downwards one.
Its entirely possible to add in a ton of other issues, but people are posting the same things. The lack of patching XP exploits immediately so people reached 100 in mere days was a huge problem and that doesn’t bode well for future exploits that may appear.
Issue #5
Enemy CC needs to be nerfed significantly, the overwhelming amount of player deaths in this game isn’t due to butcher, or random mobs. But being chain stunned, frozen, rooted, feared etc, there has to be a solution to this issue, and for HC players absolutely needs a fix because once again, I’d say overwhelming amount of HC deaths have probably been attributed to losing control of your character and being unable to do anything about it.
