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Lots of Achievements for Diablo 3 Season 3 Gone? Why? An Open Letter To Blizzard Entertainment

This text is mostly from my original post on the official Diablo 3 forums. It is replicated here for the general internet community to see: https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/16952355725

Update: April 17, 2015

Tyvalir commented on my post and Blizzard is listening! The “Open Letter” is now closed. 🙂 Direct Link.

04/16/2015 11:00 AM Posted by Tyvalir

Great feedback! You all have my thanks for sharing your perspectives so constructively here. Even fifteen pages later, I can see that most responses are on topic and respectful in their tone. *insert applause*

I’m still parsing through and collecting all of the ideas presented in this thread (since there’s a lot of good stuff here). By all means, please continue this discussion and I’ll make sure your feedback gets in front of the right folks.

Great feedback! You all have my thanks for sharing your perspectives so constructively here. Even fifteen pages later, I can see that most responses are on topic and respectful in their tone. *insert applause*

I’m still parsing through and collecting all of the ideas presented in this thread (since there’s a lot of good stuff here). By all means, please continue this discussion and I’ll make sure your feedback gets in front of the right folks.

TLDNR: Cutting out all the original achievements (class, explore, event, boss and monster kills, etc) is not the way to spark interest in Season 3. It excludes a massive amount of the player base shooting for “The Achievement Point Leaderboards” in a season.

The long post:
Update: Confirmed on page 6 on the forum thread that this is not a bug:

04/13/2015 12:55 AM Posted by TheTias

The 2.2 PTR’s “Season 3” had the same achievements as we have now. That is, all of the regular achievements had been removed on the PTR just as they are removed on Live.

Thank you for the information and time required to reply. I wish I would have actually known this before Friday when Season 3 officially started. I would have began my campaign of “get answers” much, much sooner! 🙂
This also, with out a doubt, confirms that this is “not a bug”. Now I want to know “why” as the title of this thread states.

And to continue with the original information:

I played season 1 and 2 only for the season achievement point leaderboards (even though “starting over” was fun, to a point).
My career/non-season achievement score is 7200 or 98%.

Season 1 – I ended at #217 on the Americas Achievement list (because it was 11 weeks).
Season 2 – I ended at #304 on the Americas Achievement list (because it was only 7 weeks).
Season 3… Why try?

With the Season 2 Achievement point leaderboard
#1 had 8280 points.
#1000 had 4910.
8280 – 4910 = 3370
3370 / 10 = 337
The top and the bottom are separated by 337 different possible achievements available.

While in Season 3:
970 is the maximum amount of points available.
79 total achievements possible.
How is this even close to being considered “better” for their main gaming base and the largest segment of revenue? I fail to understand.
I am not asking to make it “easier” to get on a leaderboard. I am asking to keep it the way it was as it was a great system that allowed a much larger player base with a massive variety on play styles to have a shot at getting listed and did nothing to reduce the amount of top tier players fighting for the top. A win for all!

Oddly enough, I read the blog post as “We added a whole lot of achievements for Season 3, so enjoy!”
Instead of “We now made the only thing casuals can go for completely invalid in Season 3!”

From the Season 3 now live blog post: https://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/18710109/season-3-now-live-4-10-2015
And I quote:

“And that’s not all! We’ve also completely re-worked previous Seasonal Achievements to focus more on the challenging accomplishments you can achieve during a Season. There are 100 new Seasonal Achievements altogether in normal and Hardcore, giving you plenty of new challenges to take on this Season.

As always, our philosophy when creating Achievements is that they should require time and effort to obtain. The Conquests and Season-exclusive Achievements available in Season 3 reflect this idea. While some may be achieved through normal play, you’ll find that some require creativity and dedication if you want to complete them!”

As always“?!?!? This one completely cracks me up… As always when creating Achievements…
Since when? Four hours ago? Does “As always” at Blizzard really mean four hours, just like Soon™ means forever?
Most of the bold can be translated to mean “Casual gamers need not apply”.

Sure, Blizzard wants to create challenging new achievements… while deleting almost every single one that we have been earning since the game came out and when Seasons started? What?

I cannot get to the top of any class on the leaderboards Greater Rift completion solo or in group (I do not play public games and have zero pro-gamer friends) on Americas leaderboards, even though I probably play a lot more than most people like to label “Casuals”.

My best character in Season 2 made it to Solo Greater Rift 34… after seven weeks. I did not even get the Season 2 Greater Rift Conquest… for 10 points… LOL!

Why did Blizzard completely exclude a vast amount of their player base from Season 3?
I get that a lot of “post retail” added stuff has been massive amounts of experiments, but this is ridiculous.

Do they seriously think “Casuals” are going to continue at all with Seasons now?
400 points did take little time to get (ya, I admit a bit too easy) for the Season 1 and 2 “rewards”, but now for Season 3, it may take weeks instead of hours.
Does Blizzard really think that getting “Season 3 only items to drop” four months early is an incentive, just to delete another redundant character in an already crowded character list and start all over again, no longer even using the items earned?

Isn’t getting all the achievements and hitting at least one leaderboard the “end game” draw?
It was for me!

I must say that I liked having the 1000 players listed on the leaderboard separated by four thousand points instead of ten (or maybe even zero) at Seasons end.
I can only see Season 3 ending in two weeks for me. Why make it end in seven weeks as Season 2 did, or as one developer already said: four months? (Thanks Spluncy for the link):

The Season 3 Achievements are also pro-group to the max. In other words, a player that normally plays with three other people can leave the group, do a solo level 40 Greater Rift, get all of the solo Greater Rift achievements in 14 minutes and 59 seconds for 240 points and then continue playing in a group.

This is broken. Period.

The leaderboards will be completely taken up by people playing 23 hours a day for a week or two and then locked out of for everyone else for the rest of the season, slated for at least four months.

Seriously.

Blizzard, please reconsider this action for Season 4.
Don’t kill the genre for me after 19 years of dedication.

I have always lurked the Diablo 3 forums and laughed at the silly rage quit noobs trying to get their point across and I am not one of them. I will continue playing, but not as intently as I would like.

– Signed, a long time PC Vanilla to ROS player completely irritated.
Look at my post count (at the time of the original post, it was two). I don’t troll forums. I post when something is really broken
I have been playing Blizzard games since December 31, 1996.
Go ahead, Google what release date that was… I dare you.

Black Viper from www.blackviper.com

Posted in Articles, Gaming, News, Random Ramblings, The Rant

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