Diablo 4 Developer Reveals Potential Launch Window for Leaderboards

Diablo 4 has mostly been a success for developer Blizzard Entertainment since it launched last month. That said, some members of the community have been annoyed that the sequel is lacking several quality-of-life features that past games had. One great example of this is Seasonal Leaderboards. In previous games, players would grind through seasons and be able to see how they match up against other players. With Season 1 nearly here, many players were hoping to hear good news about leaderboards since Diablo 4 didn't ship with them. Blizzard's global community development director did recently give us a potential window for the launch of Leadersboards, but it's much further out than most fans want to see.

As first spotted by GameRant, Diablo 4's global community development director Adam Fletcher recently took to Twitter to respond to comments players were making in regards to a recent hotfix. Someone mentioned that even though the Druid loot tables were originally broken, hurting their ability to proceed, their biggest issue with the game right now is the lack of a leaderboard ahead of Season 1. After all, Diablo 3 launched with the feature, so it's fair for players to expect it to be included in its sequel.

Druid loot tables took a while as the game was doing some backend updates on servers so we didn't deploy any hotfixes during that period.

Leaderboards we have mentioned will be in a later season. Maybe by S3. Team wants to get them right and put more time on them.

— Adam Fletcher (@PezRadar) July 8, 2023

Unfortunately, Fletcher revealed that leaderboards won't be available for Season 1, but "maybe by [Season] 3." Knowing that seasons are going to be around three months, that means leaderboards are at least six months away. Not exactly the news many fans were hoping for. That said, Fletcher does say that the "team wants to get them right and put more time on them." Hopefully, that means the leaderboard will launch without any issues, but it is surprising to see Blizzard make players wait for nearly a year before a feature that was core to previous games is added.

In many ways, this feels like a symptom of the larger issues players are starting to have with Diablo 4 as we get closer to the launch of Season 1. As discussed by streamers like Asmongold, it appears that Blizzard isn't targeting the issues players want, seemingly pushing them down the line to a later date. And when you combine that with each season launching with a paid battle pass, some fans are getting the impression that Blizzard is more focused on setting up a long-tailed revenue stream than getting Diablo 4 into the place it needs to be.