Among the many complaints that players are leveraging against Diablo IV, one of them is arguably far more serious than class nerfs: a bit of dark pattern design that caused multiple players to accidentally use their premium season pass upgrade when all they were trying to do was check their seasonal journey instead.
Several posts have sprung up across Twitter, the official forums, YouTube, and Reddit from players who are either reporting or demonstrating how going to the season journey UI automatically has the game’s cursor default on the “activate premium” button, which in many cases is being accidentally clicked when players were instead trying to check their seasonal progress.
The issue appears to be console specific, as most video footage shows the button highlighted then navigated away without a mouse cursor on-screen, though there is footage from one PC player who shows how his mouse cursor snaps to the purchase button.
As a result, multiple players are accusing Blizzard of using dark patterns to compel purchases, particularly since there’s no option to confirm or deny the purchase once the associated button is pressed. Others simply call it malicious design, while other players are hoping to get an accelerated battle pass grant they received for buying the ultimate edition of the ARPG returned to them after being tricked into redeeming them.
One of the loudest calls against this is a livestreamer named Rurikhan, whose Twitter thread garnered enough responses to summon forth D4’s Community Development Director Adam Fletcher. “Just had a powwow with people on this post stream. We have a temp fix in the works that will at least ensure the cursor isn’t defaulted there and will instead be defaulted on Season Journey,” he writes. No details on when this temporary fix will be released are available right now, and the game’s patch notes site has yet to be updated at the time of this writing.
Readers might recall how the problem with dark pattern design caused Epic Games to pay a fine for using the practice in Fortnite. It would be a real shame if Blizzard had to face the same music.
So Blizzard placed the 'Activate Premium Battle Pass' button right next to the button you have to constantly press to check your Season Journey.
Guess what happened to me and at least 5 others on my stream. This is straight up Malicious Design. @Diablo pic.twitter.com/99KhTR51ad
— Rurikhan (@Rurikhan) July 21, 2023
