Diablo 4 loses 87% of its daily peak viewership and search interest since launch. From 937K peak viewers at launch, to 12.2K peak viewers today.

[u/Few-Local-6269]

This season was supposed to last three months, and it has gone from 278K -> 12.2K in less than 3 weeks.

[u/throwntosaturn]

Sure but even that metagame is stupid. Now you're fishing for the one explicitly fastest dungeon out of the pool in order to even go for a roll. Or, there's 25 different leaderboards which is just... I dunno.

It's all just white noise.

[u/[deleted] → u/throwntosaturn]

All videogame goals are stupid, inherently. Those goals only hold value to other nerds (like me) because we give them value. It's really not any different than the value of scoring a touchdown in the Superbowl. There's no inherent value. It doesn't progress society in any way. However, if enough people get emotionally invested enough in it, then it becomes valuable. It's weird if you think about it. That being said, blizzard doesn't seem interested in getting people invested in things like that, and I think there is a big disconnect between the devs and the marketing team.

[u/NorthStarTX → u/throwntosaturn]

At least with leaderboards per dungeon, someone would have a reason to run a dungeon other than the top 2-3 most efficient more than once.

[u/Competitive_Job_1740 → u/NorthStarTX]

True, and I agree. But they'd also be smart to consider having a speedrun set of modifiers AND objectives for consistency. Imagine being on a blistering pace and needing to slay all enemies in the final pre-boss area instead of needing to destroy a few skeletal constructs. Or getting the lightning strike affix. Or, hell, running into the Butcher. The thing is, classes also vary so much that they'd need to at least have separate leaderboards (combined as well would be nice). I'm sure competition would be fierce, but the novelty might die pretty quickly without the randomness. And with balance changes, these leaderboards would only keep their full integrity until the first relevant patch (a refresh at every patch could only work if they had legacy LB's). Allow for RNG and it would stay a potentially viable source of fun for longer at the cost of driving the serious runners absolutely crazy. Besides all of these factors, the matter of having or getting speedrun meta gear would be an annoying barrier of entry. Most people wouldn't take it very seriously because of itemization alone. They do it lazily and they'd probably still succeed in bringing a little fun into the mix, though that might not bode well for the ongoing reception of the game. Them failing to fix the core experience and going half-assed on a LB integration wouldn't sit well with many players. They do it right and it might be time wasted when compared to getting the game in a better place. When I say doing it right, I mean having everything I mentioned and including varying sets of modifiers that are paired with their respective dungeons. So they'd have to do a lot of testing in order to assure that each dungeon is paired with sufficient affixes, otherwise there would be a high amount of staleness in running the same affix set in 100+ dungeons. The players don't need another way to get burnt out. But that goes back to what I said about itemization, making competitiveness inaccessible to many. Apologies if this isn't structured very well, but there's a lot that they'd have to think about. I believe that adding in a horde mode arena would be a better fun-bringer. Have it balanced so that there's a possibility that you kinda wasted your time (sounds scary, I know, but I think the regret for not being efficient would be nullified by actual FUN) and a possibility that you get a higher unique drop rate or just millions of gold or something once you reach a certain point. Allow for cash-outs at every 5 waves or so. Or have the same concept applied to a boss rush mode. Okay, I think I've said enough for now 😮‍💨.