Before the update for gauntlet there was only a few 1000 people on steam charts and per activeio website less than 200k people playing the game overall from the 7million you had from release. Granted you would lose roughly half after a few months or less as people don’t stay in 1 game. However!
After the update for gauntlet there is still only per steam charts which has factual data:
- 3,776 players right now
- 5,604 24-hour peak
- 28,836 all-time peak 3 months ago
and roughly 170k per activieio website which cannot confirm any real numbers of players since its a website not ran by the company (Blizzard) and there is no factual data here that supports their claims of how many people are actually playing Diablo 4.
| Diablo 4 Live Player | Users | - |
|---|---|---|
| Online Players (1H) | 170,992 |
So out of roughly 7 million players at the start/release of the game your retention is less than .03% of those that bought the game. Here are the reasons on why you cant keep people playing your game to make money:
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Nobody likes the season battle pass as it only infuriates casual players that spend their money on real life like kids, wife, house, bills, etc. If the game was F2P I could see this monetary model but its not. The minimum box tag is 70$ for the game (unless on sale which we seen alot for you to entice more people to come buy this game) on top of a overpriced cash shop and battle pass.
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Your cash shop is overpriced so much that just like Diablo Immortal you are only catering to the whales with your 60$ skin bundles etc. For 60$ I can buy many other games and get hundred of hours of fun in them so why would I spend that much for a skin or horse in a game? Max should be 5$ for something in cash shop and even that’s a stretch.
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No end game, you recently added gauntlet (AoZ at one point which was a failed design at an end game activity) to try and appease players or bring them back and clearly that hasn’t worked since same amount of people play as before it.
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0 Itemization
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No hard and soft caps on stats like overpower allowing class’s like barbarian that get 2 additional weapons to build any one stat to insane levels.
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0 Crafting system with any meaning with absurd gold pricing after 20 rolls of the 1 stat you try to reroll. You then end up getting the same stats over and over never getting the one you are looking for ultimately leading to items costing 2billion a roll making the casual players, or any rational player to give up.
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0 Runes or runewords
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0 set items you have spent more time working on trash systems like AoZ and gauntlet for your streamers and this itemization rework (which I hope you do something right with it this time), and balancing that you clearly miss the mark on it every time.
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You claim live service was to stop duping, hacking, etc. Yet every season we have had massive amounts of duping to the point where you just started wiping legit mats from legit players that legit farmed them because you wont spend the money to actually find the real problem.
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You allow broken things to stay in the game for months before you fix it and even go on your stream stating “barb charge is on the line of broken but not to broken so we will just leave it alone for now”, then go and buff this class that has the biggest advantage over every other class due to 2 additional weapon slots that allow 2 more aspects and 2x more stat boosts. Barbs hit for trillions while every other class stuck hitting like a wet noodle.
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You told everyone you were going back to the roots like D2 as a sell pitch for Diablo 4 then go and make the game more and more like Diablo 3 where we have stats reaching 9000% (overpower for barb) and making the grind from 1-100 so easy its done in a day if you play for roughly 8 hours. D2 it takes a week of 24/7 grinding to reach 99 that’s what you should have brought us back to not this D3 get power leveled to max level in an hour by a buddy. Why is it people can still sit at dungeon door and get exp when they are not anywhere near the content being killed? This should have been fixed from the jump but nope not even looked at or talked about just simply ignored.
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You put items behind a gated time sink of killing Uber Duriel instead of just allowing them to drop in the game (not to say they cant drop anywhere with mobs level 85 or higher per your twitter post). However, it shouldn’t take me 800,000 unique items to drop just to find 1 uber unique. They shouldn’t drop like candy but if you spend a few hundred hours killing monsters in NMD or throughout the world in a season you should have odds better than maybe 1 in 150 years to get one to drop. I can’t say what would be a good middle ground on this but adding a way to break down ubers for uber shards to craft the uber you want/need is just another slap in the face when they dont drop already unless you buy mats through RMT sites or like the streamers get fed mats.
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The game is suppose to be fun and engaging not boring and annoying. It just seems like you have to spend 5000 hours a season just to be on top. Of course not everyone can be on top or compete. However, I believe if you just rationalized the gauntlet to allow everyone to be in the same gear and setup for that week when you enter the gauntlet there wouldn’t be a issue of “all the pay2winners (rmt users) or streamers that got all the ubers they need/want will always be on top” issues. Instead it would boil down to who is actually the better gamer. Nobody would have to spend 5000 hours just to be on top and then this adds fun to the game by putting each week different builds to compete in the gauntlet with.
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Allowing uber mats to be tradable was a huge mistake and here we are 2 seasons in and you still have yet to put them as untradeable. The duping would have been fixed a long time ago and RMT sites couldn’t sell them. You could have then also made it to where if you enter the fight for any of the boss’s if you don’t have the mats in your inventory it kicks you out. Eliminating all RMT possibilities.
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Solo vs Group play is out of this world broken and not fair gameplay. Making it to where 4 man teams can get uber uniques 4x faster than solo players puts another layer of impossibility to solo players while giving group play an extreme advantage. For example I can buy Diablo 4 on PC and I can only play my character’s that’s it, but if I buy it on PlayStation or Xbox I can connect 3 other controllers and have a total of 4 players 3 of them literally teleport with me as i run around killing stuff never once having to do or kill anything with those characters but they still get mats from helltide chest, cinders to open those chests, experience, gear, etc. Its just unreal how you still allow this to be in the game.
So my question to the Devs is what are you really doing with this game? If you botch the itemization update that .03% player retention you currently have is going to go even lower till the game is a ghost town forever.
XoXoXoXoXo 
Edit: Per Urza which I fully agree with the Gauntlet should have had an armory from the start, better fairness enforced (all top 100 players are using macros), there should be different tiers to the gauntlet making t70 the start level 1 gauntlet up to t110 level 5 gauntlet.
's “Get gud” “QQ moar” “…win button” “…hyperbole” “…slander” “…derailment bait”.