Keep in mind that D2 LoD was the first game to do this (to my knowledge). It made sense back then, at least for the first one, they needed an incentive to get people to play ladder. If the items that most builds require are missing from an RPG at launch, then it’s essentially another phase of beta testing rather than a full release.Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade Threadĭ2R being completely new start for everyone, it makes 0 fucking sense whatsoever to keep those incentives in, there's no benefit to it. If the leaderboard mechanism of ladder is missing at launch, that’s fine. This is a big downer for launch, I don’t think anyone expected that the game would launch with many of the most popular items (i.e. The only impact is that the initial X weeks/months of farming is effectively wasted as we’ll all need to remake our characters when the ladder launches so that we can actually get the items needed to build our characters. There is no good technical reason for this that I can think of: (1) Single player will have these runewords included so the content exists in game (2) Launch of the game will require substantial server resources whether we can make these runewords or not. That means that we would spend an unspecified amount of time farming on non-ladder characters that would never be able to complete their builds, so effectively the real launch date is getting pushed out. The leaderboards missing is mildly annoying, but having a large number of items missing needed to complete almost every PVP or PVE build at launch with no ability to ever find them on those characters is a serious oversight. Since characters cannot traditionally be converted from non-ladder to ladder, it means the game is launching with a large number of items missing that would be needed to complete the majority of builds. griffons, thunderstrokes, reaper’s toll, gheed’s charm, death fathom, etc.) and runewords (spirit, insight, infinity, grief, fortitude, etc.) can only be found/created during a ladder season. This has important implications as it doesn’t just impact the leaderboards, a number of unique items (i.e.

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Diablo 3 ladder only items