I don't play Diablo IV anymore as anyone who lead my last rant could conclude, but that doesn't stop me from gawking with morbid curiosity at the ongoing dumpster fire.
I'm not hear to talk about Season 3, though Season 3 is getting a lot of probably deserved hate... ok, maybe I will talk about Season 3 for a minute, as a walk up to my point.
If I had to put my finger on what is so off with D4 at this point is that it is trying to be a virtual
Skinner box without the treats.
First they create "uber uniques" that check all of the boxes that a player would consider "uber" for various class builds... and they are so rare that in the first 4 months of play, with all the millions grinding the game, we had.. 2 confirmed drops. People start to realize that the grind for Ubers is wasted effort, especially if you aren't grinding D4 as a job.
Then they decide to "fix" this by changing how damage is dealt, essentially nerfing the Uber gear and making it not worth the grind. This I'm sure came as great news to the handful of people who had wasted their lives grinding for the ear and
actually got one.
So then people weren't interested in the Uber grind anymore and so D4 decided that what people really wanted was more ways to grind Ubers... sure they were all pains in the ass and required more material grinding then actually doing fun stuff (comparatively)... but in Season 2 you finally had a modestly increased chance that IF an uber dropped for you from one of the new end bosses, it had maybe a 15-20% chance of being the one you want! The only reasonable change in this new system was that if an uber dropped on one specific boss, it was guaranteed to have a perfect roll on all of the stats. Yay? I mean, sure that is good... but your chances are still effectively zero.
Now they are in to Season 3, people hate it, and there is little improvement in the Uber hunt mechanic. The only development in this time is that, well, time has passed and so with more millions of hours played there are a rowing number of people who have gotten Uber Uniques.
So in a hint of things to come, D4 Devs have announce that people should
hold on to their uber uniques because they are working on some new game mechanic that involves Uber Uniques....
So on the one hand they are admitting that there is a very real possibility that the ubers are so nerfed now that people may discard them (to free up storage space?), and on the other hand they are still giving a giant middle finger to the 99.9999% of the remaining player base who still haven't gotten an Uber unique drop.
So some future game mechanic, apparently, will rely on owning a piece of gear that effectively nobody has, and the closest most people would come to experiencing this mechanic is by watching a Twitch stream.
Bravo, Blizzard. Bravo.
It was bad enough that D4 decided that, unlike every successful ARPG on the market, that their Seasonal Mechanics wouldn't retire into the base game, thereby invalidating every seasonal character when the season ends, but removing any achievable goal from the end game other than chasing fleeting meta builds makes D4 one of the least repayable ARPGs I have ever played.