"In the firm I was in, we held weekly events with exclusive prizes and were planned to let you [...] participate with uncommon in-game currency, which would let you get one of the major prizes. Designers also had to offer additional milestone prizes in addition to that major prize, which usually require spending real cash to be able to win the event. The D2R Items majority of our milestones and measures to determine if an event did well is obviously how much individuals spent. We did take into account sentiment, however, I'm convinced that the higher-ups always cared more about if the event enticed people to spend."

Real-time payments aren't brand new in any way by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't pioneer them but it's disingenuous to present that as the case. The action-RPG from Blizzard isn't the primary reason, but rather the worst amalgamation of hundreds of different free-to-play mobile and PC games. It comes with two distinct Battle Passes, each of which comes with their own rewards that remain only available to characters (and not the entire roster) as well as too many different currencies available for the average player to keep track of Diablo 2 Resurrected's financial system reads as a massive mobile marketplace.

These practices, though sometimes met with resistance but have now become commonplace in the game industry as a whole. One could argue that popularity of loot box or other real-money transactions within AAA games have contributed to this kind of unregulated economy, but the more that AAA gaming moves towards the game-as-a-service model as it shifts to the games-as-service model, the more the same characteristics as mobile games that have been within this extremely popular sphere for more than a decade.

This isn't only evident in the use paid currency to purchase items and gacha mechanics and publication of drop rates of rarer items. Gacha refers to using game currency, whether it's free, or purchased through an in-game shop, in order to get something you want like pieces of equipment for instance, in the case of Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever popular (and ever-lasting) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.

In the case of Diablo 2 Resurrected, there's the usage of legendary crests (which can be obtained or bought) to increase the chance of a 5-star gem appearing in the dungeons and dungeons endgame. Although it's not exactly traditional in its way of presenting (most gachas are played out by "rolling" using a time-limited banner) the players are engaged in the same kind of D2R Ladder Items buy randomness in a similar manner. In many ways this is how players are engaging in the same way. Diablo franchise was building towards these mechanisms since the beginning of its existence as Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks in the past.