In a recent news announcement, Blizzard revealed which 1,000 hopeful max-level hardcore characters will have their names written in stone, as long as they followed a few rules when they hit the level cap.
To get on the list, players had to survive 100 gruelling levels of Diablo 4's hardcore mode where death is final—even when it's not your fault—and post proof of their exploits to Twitter. This included tagging the official Diablo 4 Twitter account, as well as adding a hashtag, a Battle.net tag and convincing proof.
Given how demanding this challenge is, even without a time limit, one might have expected Blizzard to be pretty thorough in verifying the victors. Unfortunately, in a Reddit thread titled "Did Blizzard Actually Skip Over Me For #Diablo4Hardcore?" quite a few players say they've been left in the dust.
User KentuckyFriedAnivia wrote: "Clear as day there would be issues with this [...] When you're going through thousands of tweets it is easy to pass over or miss some." Another baffled user Hawkwise83 shared a common sentiment in the thread, asking "Why would Blizzard need proof? They have the data on their servers…"
While we don't know for sure what data Blizzard does and doesn't collect, it does raise the question—why use a platform that's been really unstable at the best of times for such an exclusive prize, one that was bound to lure in a hardcore, dedicated fanbase? Twitch streamer Asmongold also replied to the announcement tweet, alleging that both Team Liquid streamer Rakin and streamer DJMontague missed their golden ticket.
One requirement was to have a Battle.net account "in good standing", so it's entirely possible some players are being hush-hush about previous bans or warnings in other games. Others are cursing themselves for forgetting to properly tag Diablo 4 in their posts—which, in their defence, wasn't mentioned on Blizzard's Twitter announcement in June.
I'm a little baffled as to why Blizzard elected to use Twitter, of all things, for such a difficult challenge. Granted it's been good for publicity leading up to this point—Diablo 4's statue-based FOMO had plenty of streamers aiming for that goal and dying in hilariously tragic ways, keeping us all entertained. The least they deserve is for their place in stone to be justly immortalised under the Daughter of Hatred herself. Maybe a solid eight hours of sleep, too.
