Diablo III Season 1 Launches Friday
Diablo III community manager “Lylirra” jumped on the Battle.net forums Monday night to announce that the first Season will begin Friday, August 29. Blizzard won’t open the doors all at once but will stagger the release so that the servers can handle the load. Here in North America, Season 1 will begin to roll out at 6:00pm PDT on Friday.
Blizzard is introducing Seasons with the release of patch 2.1.0, which takes place today in North America. Seasons is a new “social” competitive system that includes acquiring as many Achievements as possible, reaching the highest tiers in Greater Rifts, and completing Season-exclusive Achievements called Conquests.
“You can track your progress against other players for the activities above on the Leaderboards and compete with others for the highest rankings,” the Diablo III blog explained earlier this month. “Want to be the first Hardcore player in the new Season to reach Level 70? Complete that Achievement and you'll be immortalized on the Conquest leaderboard.”
According to the blog, Seasonal heroes are the only characters that can complete Conquests. These tasks are offered in Hardcore and Normal modes, and are difficult to complete, making them different than the typical Achievement. The first 1000 players will be rewarded by having their name on the Conquest Leaderboard throughout the Season.
For gamers who don’t care about Leaderboards, the Season will provide ten new Legendary items to play with. They will be made available throughout the Season and will be rolled over into the standard game once the Season ends.
The good news is that all this work wasn’t accomplished for nothing: Seasonal characters become regular avatars when the Season ends. They will also retain the loot they picked up during the Season, including blood shards, gold, crafting materials, Stash tabs, Artisian level learned and more.
For more information about what Seasons will bring, check out Blizzard’s preview here. Happy hunting!
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Its pure BS that they came up with the idea to release for consoles afterwards, the whole design stinks of dumped down (no offence, the input options as well as the hardware on the consoles are limiting) console design.
Consoler's go ahead and vote it down the post if you like, know the truth can hurt when not viewed objectively.
My 2 cents!
My thoughts exactly.
first of all i upvoted you (you know you like the upvotes).
but games are always about progress. if we really look at games it is about accomplishing some sort of goal. these accomplishments really do not mean anything but there is something to be said for just finding some goal in an activity that you already enjoy and meeting that goal.
for example i casually play on kongregate (at 1440p and CF 7950's) and I do take some weird sense of pleasure in seeing that I have a higher player lvl than others. I will a times play games I do not really care about just for the 10xp. why? because I am human and we like to compare ourselves to others.
Eh. Half and half.
The addons don't appeal to me (D3 *barely* does, to be honest) but some people like that sort of competition. Why not give them something?
I keep thinking back to City of Heroes, where badges (and accolades) were introduced *along with* other content. New zone? Exploration badges, defeat badges, maybe some new giant monster or event to get badges in - they were a very organic part of the game, and some people enjoyed going after them and seeing just how many badges they could get. They even set up a fan site to help track and rank them.
In some ways, it's PVP without directly fighting another player. Just another form of competition.
If you're not into it? *shrug* Ignore it. I did.
So all that money they get from Wow players and extremely high priced expansions yet they are unable to handle the load? I wonder what their servers specs are, its the only MMORPG company that has to make 6+ hours of maintenance every tuesday only to have issue again 1-2 days later.