I am a casual player just wanting to play diablo 4 campaign normally. About 6 months ago I playeda bout 20 minutes on one account. Then I come back now and create a new character. I accidentally click some “welcoem back bonus” that shoots me to level 50. I wanted to play normally not jump to 50. I deleted that character and start over but new character still has a million gold.
By the way, this was after the first character I created accidentally skipped all the campaign which was the default setting.
I’ve been playing since D1, D2, and D3 and all those games, you could just play through the campaign casually and leave all the endgame grinding stuff to the hardcore players and for some reason now that’s front and center and it takes a huge amount of effort just to play the game like a normal person. Welcome back bonus is not obvious at all what it does, and ruins the games for people who want a regular campaign experience like Diablo games always offered.
This is a game where you look for billions. 1 Million is literally nothing.
Except for the leveling, the welcome back bonus will improve your experience by not making you chase stuff that actually distracts you from the game itself, like collecting Altars of Lilith.
This game has a lot of problems and bad things. The one you are complaining about isn’t one of them.
The game is obviously catering way too hard to people who think playing the campaign is the “tutorial” and want live service, seasonal events, minmaxing late game stuff.
Because those people complain the most online, it’s obvious when most of the reviews are “I played 100 hours within first week of launch and late game is balanced poorly.”
But servicing those players has downgraded the experience for people who just want the classic Diablo experience.
There should obviously be a mode with NONE of this stuff. Just play the campaign and do the quests without chat from ElvenSlayer69 and without events about collect goblins for the christmas loot. If you play for the ambience, all the alerts about this stuff completely kill it.
The casual audience posts less online but I can assure you plenty of people want the classic Diablo experience, and all this live service stuff significantly undermines it.
The fact that they made it so you deafult to skipping campaign, can accidentally skip to level 50, and then yuo can’t create a character that doesn’t share gold with others is clear evidence dev team is abandoning casuals who want classic lore based campaign.
Game needs a classic mode even though it’s only a year and a half old. Should be a version you can play that emulates the 6 weeks before seasons began. Game was challenging then. Mythics were nigh unheard of. It was worldwide news when someone found one.
The good news is that the gold has no impact on the gameplay. If you’re solo and not buying anything for gear whilst it is a bit jarring to be a millionaire after nearly dying in the tundra it’s more fanciful than damaging.
Though I don’t think there will ever be a way to “reset” the map. Altars of Lilith are permanent finds.
while i don’t think anyone in the studio has the guts or skills to take up the challenge of providing a button to reset the welcome bonus, which involves a lot of database rollbacks and triggers, you’ll have to live with that mistake.
“Accidentally”… You mean you had no idea what it is, but was curious and clicked it. On porouse. Well that’s on you buddy. What did you think would happen?
To be fair I could easily see this happening. As the quest itself just tells you to go to the chest, offers three options to choose from then gives you no warning what it’s going to do once you select an option.
For any new player who hasn’t read anything about the game it can be a little jarring. In the long run it’s not that big of a deal as they really only lose out on finding the Lilith statues, but it should have a pop-up with a blurb about what it’s about to do, with a yes or no confirmation button.
Well it might be just me, but I rather alt+tab out of the game and do a quick google search, before I do anything I am not shure about. But yeah a boost doesn’t necceraly means it changes your world state. Still there is no accident here. There is no way you run up to an NPC click on it than click on a selected option by accident.
Have you used the booster? I myself thought people must be real stupid to click something without reading, but after giving it a shot myself I completely understand.
You give a giant purple priority quest to new players telling them they can get a ‘Welcome Back Booster’, tell them to choose a theme that matches their character and that’s it. There is not a single game I know where an irreversible level-up boost doesn’t come with a warning and ask for confirmation, but this one doesn’t even tell you that it will level up your character at all! It doesn’t tell you ANYTHING and the only way to find out in-game is to click it – which, I’m sorry, is also just what you are meant to do with a quest. You are meant to be curious in a game.
If clicking one of the choices gave you a pop-up explaining what it does, I’m certain this forum would be filled with: newbies scared to click it complaining about a lack of explanation, followed by us snarking at them about how they obviously have to click on it and seriously why would you go to the internet before even attempting to just click the damn thing in-game???
I also do not think that a ‘welcome back booster’ implies such a big level-up boost just from experience with other games. So it’s not a common sense thing either. What new players think would happen upon doing the mysterious quest the game recommends to them is literally anything but a forced change to your character that cannot be undone – and they are right to do so.
It may be difficult to remember for those of us who have been playing for a while, but the new player experience in any game is often one of the best parts of it. You don’t get to go back to experiencing a game for the first time, when it still feels big before you know everything about it. Having to restart your first character where you’re probably playing through the story and having a fairly immersed experience really takes the wind out of your sails.
I obviously didn’t “accidentally” click it in the sense that I didn’t mean to click the button, I just assumed the button was part of the early campaign (it was labeled under my "quests) and didn’t realize it would render the early campaign trivial by speed leveling me. I just thought it would give me some minor boost or something. I don’t alt-tab for every single thing in a game, that sounds very tedious, especially in a game that’s supposed to be fast paced mouse clicking game.
I’m not even expecting a rollback, just an option to NOT share gold so I could do the campaign with a fresh character. I just wish there was more of a classic single player experience.
As another complaint along the same line, if you TP in a dungeon, then exit, you have to redo the entire dungeon and the TP vanishes. And if you idle in town you get kicked. This isn’t how D2 works.
It’s a really hostile setup to anyone with parenting responsibilities who might be forced to take a break mid-dungeon. And another example of this game being designed exclusively for hardcore terminally online people ONLY, which is NOT how D1 or D2 worked, both of which had online multiplayer endgame, and D2 had beloved endgame, but if you just wanted to chill and play a singleplayer campaign it was still a GREAT game for that. D4 seems to want to make that impossible even though they could easily do it (have mode with no shared gold, no “events”, allow TPs to persist on exit).
Again, I don’t care about “oh all this stuff doesn’t matter because it’s really the endgame balance once you play 1000 hours that matters”. I’m talking from the perspective of people who are trying to play 20 hours a month and might be interrupted. Game is crippled for that.
