Ring the bell, it's time for me to take another dive into Blizzard's weird microtransactions again—horses with $65 of mandatory currency slapped on the side of them, FOMO dinosaurs with hefty in-game benefits, and now this: A basic lack of a confirm screen occasionally biting $7.50 out of Diablo 4 players' wallets because, well, who's to say.
Introduced in patch 2.2, the reliquary system markets itself as an alternative to linear battle passes—instead of slapping you with a track full of tat you might not want, you can "customise your path", promises the patch website.
Which, in theory, would be great—if it weren't for a splash of dark patterning that has players full of consternation. As spotted by WoWHead, players are accidentally spending money thanks to a bafflingly-placed purchase button.
The issue is this: Once you've bought a reliquary, you need to unlock items within it by grabbing "favour tokens", which you get by doing quests in-game. Standard stuff. However, you can also choose to spend some more platinum to skip the grind. That wouldn't be weird on its own, except—take a look at this screen, shared by user Loika on the game's subreddit.
You'll notice that the option to purchase with platinum is on the centre of the screen. Not only that, but it's just as prioritised in terms of button size as the "claim" option with your freemium currency. If you haven't properly digested how the system works, and are just flipping through menus, you'd be forgiven for accidentally pressing "purchase with platinum". And if you've got platinum in your account—well, tough luck. Say goodbye to around $7.50's worth of plat.
The situation seems worse on console. As user Swiftfooted explained on the game's subreddit a while back, you start on the "cancel" button and have to tap the D-pad twice to get to the "claim" option—making it all too easy to misinput and spend too much money.
But that's not the only problem, here—there are three options to buy reliquaries. You can get all three of them for a (reasonable) 1000 platinum, around $10/£8.30 by buying the "Premium Battle Pass Bundle".
Individually, they cost 500 platinum, so getting the bundle is cheaper. However, if you buy one and decide to cash out later, you're locked out, as the patch page reads: "Once an individual Reliquary isa purchased, the Premium Battle Pass Bundle is no longer available."
You could also shell out for the confusingly named Deluxe Battle Pass Bundle, which is more than twice as expensive as the Premium one at a whopping 2,800 platinum. What do you get? Instant access to armour sets you could've grinded out anyway, some wings, and a little owl. I'll say it plain: This isn't a good value proposition for $25/£21 any way you slice it.
The misinput issue cited above is made worse by the pricing in proportion. Dropping plat on an armour set after buying the reliquary costs around 3/4ths of the combined reliquaries' price. Cynically-speaking, this seems like it's encouraging players to double dip by accident—or at least, Blizzard's designers aren't that interested in making sure double-dipping by accident is impossible. In the real-world, we expect folks to be sensible, but we still put guard railings near stairs.
There's plenty of responsibility on the player's heads, mind—you shouldn't be speed-clicking through any game's purchasing screen when real money's on the line. Even if you don't think Blizzard's cackling with two bags of money all the way to the bank, though, you've gotta admit that this is some bad UI design bare minimum—there's no real reason not to have a confirm screen, or to make the premium purchase smaller, more easily recognisable, and not in the way if you're playing with a gamepad.
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