The reasons for Seasons and why diablo4 will fail at it

PC General Discussion
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Intro: Ive been playing action RPGs ever since the first diablo game. Ive played diablo 3 and path of exile the recent years and this is my take on the whole seasons discussion lately and even Quinn might get some understanding by this post =)

First of all here is the reasons why to have seasons at all

  1. The economy will be reset. noone will be rich and also noone will be poor its a Fresh start an EQUAL playing field

  2. New mechanics something new for players to explore

  3. Rebalancing of the game. a reason to try a new class or build because there is a major change to the game balance wise

  4. A leaderboard reset everybody is lv 1

And here comes the reasons why diablo 4 at this time will fail on most points.

  1. there is no economy in this game besides your own economy. there is no alternate currency to trade there is only gold. not even once have i traded items with someone. there is no reason to reset an economy that doesnt exist. why start all over when your gold is only affecting yourself. there is no value beeing the first to find an item because trading and economy doestn exist in diablo 4. its a singelplayer game economy wise with multiplayer as an afterthough. its doesnt matter if everybody starts at zero when your networth doesnt have an impact on other players at all. nobody wants a reset when they themself is the only economy that exists in the game.

  2. There has to be something interesting for me to see in season. if im only repeating the same quests ive already did there is no point to do i all over. it has to change the way i experience and play the game. it has to get the sense of something NEW and INTERESTING in there. repeating the same quests and leveling process will be no different.

  3. There has to be something new to try out balance wise. if there is no new legendary power or rebalancing of my class i might aswell keep playing the old character. there needs to be some form of content to test your character against. Also transmogs. just adding a different look to spell might make somebody wants to play it. yet again check PoE

  4. there is no leaderboards. I cant see who is highest level HC or softcore. I cant see who have done the highest nightmare dungeon. I cant see who killed the most players in PVP. I cant see any high level player that has died in hardcore. there is no messages in the game that tells me " this players is the first to have done this…" there is no sense of other players even belonging in the same world i am.

my conclusion is ever since D2 ladder back in the days and Path of exile seasons
i can say the first point is the MOST important one. there is NO economy in D4. there is a difference reseting the economy for everyone and starting fresh but telling everyone to reset their progress in quests and gold earned when nobody would notice anyway its silly. me finding a PERFECT item gives not a single emotional response if there is NO VALUE in it.
finding a BIG VALUE item in a new d2 ladder or PoE season would give u a kick because u knew this will help me climb the ladder of beeing the big guy with the highest level or most things achieved. that doesnt exist in D4. its a singleplayer game with other people on your screen. your charcter could die tomorrow and noone would know who you where.

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I think the biggest problem is that previously in D2 (not D2R) for example some of the most powerful items were perpetually locked behind ladder seasons and if you wanted to find or create those items yourself you were forced to play ladder. This created an illusion that seasons were being enjoyed by the player base.

I can guarantee you that most people such as myself didn’t enjoy ladder seasons at all and only participated for those items. It always felt like a big chore to me. As soon as I had the item(s) I wanted I would go back to leveling one of my main non-ladder characters towards lvl 99.

So now, they’ve made the mistake of taking that old system of locking new game content behind seasons and implemented it in to D4. They would have been much better off progressively releasing new content to everyone on their existing characters and having competitive ladder seasons as an optional side thing for the minority who actually want it.

And to all the people giving gaslight style responses to new players like “this is how ARPGs work, get used to it”, as a long time Diablo fan who has been exposed to the franchise since the original Diablo release I would say that you need to get your heads out of your rears. There is nothing fun about being forced to start a new character when you’re not even close to being done with your existing character.

The entire concept of game content gated behind seasons is and has been deeply flawed for ages. Most people put up with it because they are forced to, not because they enjoy it. To suggest that we need to keep following the same ill conceived system because “that’s the way it has always been” is total nonsense.

D4 also has several MMORPG elements which were not present in previous Diablo releases. The game has random player encounters and world events which help bring the game to life. With that in mind, splitting up the player base between seasonal players and those who just want to continue playing their existing characters will affect that sense of global community.

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Please don’t call yourself “most people” because people who play ladder in D2 and/or leagues in POE actually love this mechanic and play ladder/seasons only 90-100% of the time.

The mechanic to start at 0 gear & economy vise and to compete with firend or even with the whole community. :slight_smile:

I’ve played every ladder in D2 since ladder 1 with LOD release, all leagues in POE and enjoyed every single one of them.

If you’re a ladder player since Diablo 2 you would also know that ladders have a very big fanbase and it’s own community, not only ingame…just fyi if u didn’t know.

So the statement that most people don’t like ladder is simply wrong and only your personal opinion. :wink:

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Whether you like it or not dedicated ladder players are the minority in D2 and always have been. There are far more people playing non-ladder in D2R than those playing ladder.

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Ye but that has another reason…It’s because D2JSP practicaly ruins the economy in a new ladder within few weeks in D2R, so it’s not worth the effort anymore. :frowning:

But in POE or in D2 back in the days it is/was quite oppposite. :wink:

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I think a bigger reason is just time availability. There are far more casual players who can only pick up the game a few hours here or there each week and just don’t have the time available to do anything all that meaninful during each relatively short ladder season.

For instance it took me almost 2 years to level a sorc to 99 in D2R (didn’t have access to terror zones during more than half of it) while more dedicated players can reach 99 during a ladder season because they just play all day long every day.

On top of that people who play ladder tend to be those with very competitive personalities which also rules out most of the more casual players. Ladder was originally meant to be for those competitive players and wasn’t forced on all. Then they started with the gated content in D2 and it’s just gotten worse from there. I was hoping that they were going to smarten up about this in D4 but they’ve just decided to double down on it.

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There actually is. I was also surprised by this when I first found out. Rares are selling for tens to hundreds of millions gold. Streamers are paid in gold for carries, and then they use this billions of gold that they’ve accumulated to buy items in the market for equipping their boosted chars so they can churn out more content faster.

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I agree. Most people aren’t going to want to level up a character on Diablo 4 to “compete” with others or the whole community. This game is boring at end game at the moment. Releasing seasons as “everyone starts at zero” is not appealing at all. There aren’t even really super uniques to hunt for because they made the drop rates unachievable. I leveled to 100 while working a full time job and honestly I couldn’t care less if some random can outlevel me or find a Tempest Roar faster than me next season. I’ll pass.

I would wager the majority of players who already invested in a main will not play out seasons because we want the game on the eternal realm to be improved first. I won’t even spend time leveling an alt because the items they’d use has a ridiculously high level cap and leveling a second char is time consuming/boring. With seasons it would be even more boring if I have to re-do my renown.

Blizz should focus on beefing up the actual Diablo 4 game/end game with things like new group dungeons with better uniques/items to hunt for, battlegrounds or duel arenas for the PVPers and plenty of other features to improve the game.

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It will work in D4 because there is nothing else to do once you hit 100 besides roll an alt.

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Yeah I only ever made ladder characters in the other games for the items and prizes and because friends were doing it, not so much because resetting itself was all that enticing. I was okay with it mostly because I had friends who would help me cap my characters in a couple hours.

Starting over in this game will feel silly if it takes too long to level. No one wants to spend most of the season just getting to cap and likely not even seeing any chase items (or at least not ones that you can’t outlevel).

There’s a speed at which seasons would be nothing but a treadmill. Finishing just in time to get reset again would be terrible, I don’t think that’s very disputable. What made d2/d3 seasons fun was that rushing the character was relatively trivial so you spent almost the entire time looking for the new items.

So if they merely speed up/streamline leveling it’ll be good to go, I think.

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Lifelong fan here (since Diablo 1).
Even though Diablo 4 made an unbelievable entry, with god-like cinematics and solid gameplay introduction, it fail to fulfill its promises.

For me it failed because of these reasons:

  1. Chaotic map, whereas earlier we had perfectly sized segmented, distinguishing areas.

  2. Underwehlming villains and heroes. Lilith was unbelievably boring and was mostly seen from very specific shots. Mephisto did not have his original voice too.

  3. Overly complicated skill tree. It also costs to play around with it and many combinations won’t work plus resource regen mechanics often don’t work.

  4. Talent/Spec specific gear. That was a fatal mistake that they knew it doesn’t work since the WoW days. I literally farmed without an end and still got items for other spec-trees or talents rather than my own. If they had generalized it (in example +2 Talents to an active skill tier or any skill of your choice / increases damage per second by x% instead of increases fire dmg, ice dmg etc) would have been so much better and open the way to keep trying new combinations.

  5. No end-game indeed and takes a lot of grinding to reach world tier 4

  6. Seasonal content. I can’t believe I am not allowed to access with my MAIN CHAR the seasonal content! Fatal mistake.

Too bad. I really had high hopes for it :frowning:

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