When it comes to Diablo Immortal, since release, its monetization system has been mostly met with criticism. That criticism ranges from this is shady to accusations of being predatory and pay to win. Yet, the newest criticism might be one of the more surprising: a streamer who says he spent about $100k to power up his character can’t find anyone relatively similar to play with via matchmaking.
Player jtisallbusiness says, in a video called “Should I refund 100k on Diablo Immortal”, he says that for the past month and a half anytime he has queued up for Battlegrounds, he can’t get a match within the two hour queue time. As he has been able to play with his guild, they claimed the title of Immortals and unlocked the “Path of the Immortals” trial but the one of the first tasks to do to progress through this stage is to complete a Battleground.
He says he has tried to queue for a Battleground to progress this trial and claim rewards for the equivalent of 2-3 days over the past weeks to try and get any match to pop. Since he can’t do that, he’s also been unable to register for the next phase to try to let his clan, of which he is the leader, defend their title. Due to other circumstances he can’t even assign clan leadership to someone else.
What this potentially demonstrates is that in creating this system, perhaps the Diablo Immortal team didn’t even think this far and how having this kind of system accessible to anyone with enough cash might destabilize the play experience.
It’s easy enough to talk about whales and potential pay to win, but JT’s video got enough attention to have Blizzard reach out to him to get some sort of fix, as he says in a followup video today. While this issue might be hard for the majority to relate to, it does bring up a lot of questions about these systema and how they’re thought through and planned. After all, raking in cash is great for companies but you don’t want to gate your players out of enjoyment or access.
