I think they realized that era cycles should be tied to season cycles from now on (as they always have been). Otherwise all non-seasonal players are completely being screwed over by all the seasonal players wrecking records on NS. I completely disagree with Nevalistis' assessment, but then it's important to note that she has not made the decision, but was only the messenger. The entire dev team blanked on this and didn't see the power creep for groups (even 4 player records will be higher in S6 than in S5, as PTR has already shown us). It was a mistake. However, even though I disagree with the reason for doing this, I appreciate that it was made in an effort to protect the integrity (basically: let's sacrifice era 5 to keep era 6 competitive). Needless to say that that backfired, not only because it was not communicated before the patch (I guess it was done for a reason, as to not create a pre-patch leaderboard storm) but also because in the end the reason being given will not be true anymore (since they overlooked the Tal Twister meta and its strength for S6).
The shitstorm is real, the official forum, Reddit, Twitter, all channels are full with complaints, so I think they got the message and we can only hope they won't repeat this again. At the very least, one positive outcome is that it showed Blizzard that there's reason to care about non-season. My hope is that they also look at other regions and stop focusing so much on the Americas, because non-season is pretty much dead there. In other regions, many competitive players prefer non-season and do so for a reason; not everyone enjoys starting over and farming a dozen augments every 3 months.
A personal note/rant to follow:
To all of those saying "why are there even NS leaderboards" or "I play season, I don't care" or "who cares about season" - this lack of empathy, to me personally, is atrocious and I thought the Diablo community were better than this. I've played seasons for the last two patches as well and have not made an effort to get on the non-seasonal leaderboards since summer last year, but from looking at some data (e.g., average clear on the lower parts of the leaderboards) as well as surveying some of the threads on Reddit/official forums, I'd hazard a guess that about 30-40% of active competitive players are playing non-season. That is of course excluding all the super casual players with power levels at which they will never make it to the leaderboards. Non-season also has an east-west shift; in the Americas, non-season is dead (but so is season after SoS got wrecked, to be honest - NA has by far the least competitive leaderboards). In Europe, it's a bit more on season, but non-season has quite a lot of action going on as well (some Russian clans are focusing NS only and ZE is targeting both). In Korea, non-season is almost on par if not more competitive than seasons (the first three seasons were pointless in Korea, everyone was playing non-season there). So to say "no one cares about non-season" is a pretty dumb statement that lets anyone who says this appear as a clueless fool. Just stop doing that. Try to be a human and show empathy. Thanks.
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