The announcement of the current Diablo 4 season by Blizzard turned out to be unpopular among the people. The official Diablo Twitter account informed that Horadric Phials were dropping in greater numbers in a limited-time, with an additional boast, “Power surges through the Season. Go claim them before the splendor fades.”
Instead of excitement, the comment section proceeded to bash Blizzard. Gamers tore at Blizzard from all angles, ranging from complaints about repetitive seasonal mechanics to some outright saying they’d rather play other games.
From the jump, Brian Lutz (@IamTheNewMeta) set the tone: “dudes … y’all gotta do better than this,” which basically sums up ninety percent of the responses. People were tired of what they consider recycled content season after season. BaldGuyRandy put up a recycling symbol with the words “Recycle, recycle, recycle…” and it garnered a lot of attention.
Caballero Templario’s (@jesuitas86) Spanish comment was translated and goes hard: They’re begging for XP and better item drops with 3-4 affixes before the end of this season, “The game at a high level becomes boring and monotonous; you have to do something! Thanks.”
Then get this: a handful of players claim they’re just going to go back to playing Path of Exile 2 or Diablo 2 and 3 in favor of the new season. MartiMooz simply chimed in with, “More fun just to play D2 and D3…or PoE 2” while iAvernus added, “poe2 new stuff coming, LE new stuff coming, D4 with another powers season. Holy fuck this game really is dogshit.”
It began an argument on whether D4 players care about PoE2 at all, with @666718 claiming, “D4 players DONT CARE about poe2 lmao,” while others argued… well yes we do because D4 is not really that good.
Some of the complaints go full nitty gritty, starting with Paul (@pauldnb) expressing his immense frustration being “only 10 and 1/2 levels away from 300” and noticing increased phial drops won’t help him with his plight since one should increase XP instead. Azazel wants a blacksmith in boss lairs, throwing a test mug into the air “U guys even play the game?” which definitely stings.
Humor does have a darker twist: Hannes Dörfler (@hannes_doerfler) referred to them as “horadric phails,” just perfect wordplay really. And Tony (@ybtone) went further to suggest he’d “be more excited if you announced increased % for getting your junk caught in your zipper,” which speaks volumes about the feelings of the season.
An interesting topic that’s coming up amongst players revolves around the situation of getting to that end-game wall where nothing upgrades their build any further. Numerous comments address being in high nightmare dungeon levels and not getting upgrades anymore, thus essentially rendering the grind meaningless.
There’s an underlying tension going on between players who are still grinding and players who have kind of thrown in the towel on this season. Jon (@hawkswin2008) admitted he “honestly forgot these still drop,” which says something about the seasonal mechanics being engaged.
And, wait, did someone really ask about a Berserk collab? Weird, but okay.
The feeling at knee level for Diablo 4 players is a simple one: Blizzard just isn’t listening to their input on what really makes seasons fun and rewarding. They want actual content updates, not ones that just promise increased drop rates for items that many players don’t even need after by the time they put this into their event.
It’s kind of a bitter toffee to swallow because Diablo 4 had so much hype behind it at the launch; meanwhile, the seasonal model looks set to alienate the players rather than engage them further. When the people in the thread of your official announcement start openly talking about other games, you know this is a bad omen.
Another Diablo account tweets that the season ends on the 26th of August, so the players are only limited for time in enjoying the increased phial drops… if they even feel like logging back in right now.
Honestly, after reading through all these replies, it feels that Blizzard has to go back to the drawing board for season 10. Players want new mechanics, better loot systems, and real reasons to keep playing after going through the very initial leveling experience; otherwise, they’ll keep losing more and more players to other ARPGs that have figured out more exciting things to do with their seasonal content.
BUT – The only thing that’s keeping a few people excited is the PTR for patch 2.4; it’s the silver lining, I guess.
