Diablo III’s 19th season, the Season of Eternal Conflict, is rapidly approaching. Season 18 – the Season of the Triune – ended just a few days ago, and the pre-season patch 2.6.7 has already gone live to the game.
Typically, the next season starts about a week after the pre-season patch goes live. Seeing as it went live yesterday as of writing this, on November 12th, the release should be somewhere around Tuesday, November 19th.
The issue that arises is that the community was under the impression the season would release as soon as this Friday, the 15th. Having it delayed by half a week is a bit of a disappointment to those that want every second possible to push for the highest, fastest greater rift time, and those four days can cut into that quite severely.
Hail the Daughter of Hatred, the Creator of Sanctuary. Hail… Lilith. From the Abyss she has come.
Call her home: https://t.co/8DXtF3ah9J pic.twitter.com/uCOp3SIKA3
— Diablo (@Diablo) November 9, 2019
On the forums, Nevalistis explains that the three-day gap between patch 2.6.7 and the Season of Eternal Conflict was simply not enough time for the engineering team to create, test, and apply hotfixes to any issues that arose with the patch. If something had broken severely and left the game unplayable, there would’ve been no fixing it. Instead of a short gap between the season being extended, the game itself would’ve become unplayable.
The compromise was one week of downtime, hoping that window would give a forgiving enough cushion for any needed fixes and testing. This also will occur for future seasons moving forward. The intention will be for the one week of downtime (which was already generally what was implemented anyway) will always occur between pre-patch and season launch.
“Communication this time around was lackluster, and that lands on me,” Nevalistis explains. “I overestimated the amount of work I was capable of getting done in a very short, inflexible window. For that, you have my apology, and my team’s already making changes and adjustments to better address that for future Seasons.”
The Season preview blog will be dropping tomorrow, November 14th, and will go further in-depth on what to expect for the Season of Eternal Conflict.
At the end of the day, is a week really so long? It seems like it might be a better compromise to have seven days of expected downtime than to have an extended period of unexpected downtime after a bug critically breaks the game.
Either way, the Season of Eternal Conflict will be approaching soon. To quote Game Director Luis Barriga, see you in Hell!
