Diablo 4's early access players are trying to stoke a class war with standard edition players

Diablo 4 screenshot — (Image credit: Blizzard)

The Diablo 4 subreddit is in the midst of a bizarre class war sparked by full release server issues.

In its few days of early access, players who'd paid for the enhanced version of Diablo 4 were praising Blizzard for its smooth launch. The occasional server wobble threatened a few Hardcore characters, but for the most part Diablo 4 has proved to be one of the most trouble-free releases of a major online game I can remember.

Unfortunately, that changed somewhat when the full release arrived. An influx of new players caused those servers to struggle a bit more, and resulted in a few hours' downtime in the hours after the official Diablo 4 release date. The response from the early access players was not exactly charitable.

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In a post (archived here)titled "Can't rich people have anything nice anymore," Reddit user noahgs joked that "now that Diablo is allowing pauper edition players to bask in the glory that is us ultimate edition players, can we not have but a small concession now that we must share with disgusting plebians?" Their jocular rant goes on to suggest that the game should praise those who paid for early access, granting them a damage multiplayer against those who didn't in PvP, and instituting a tax to discourage the two groups from mingling.

Many took the post in the manner it was originally made, joking back and forth about the relative virtues of each group. It was the most popular post on the Diablo 4 post by a significant margin, racking up ten thousand upvotes more than the next most-popular submission. That is, until it was deleted by the subreddit's mods, presumably because of the disruption it's caused.

Dozens of comments on that original post made it clear that they didn't see the funny side, and similar posts aren't helping the situation. You'd have to really go wading through the least popular comments on those posts to find the most disgruntled standard edition players, but they're out there in droves, and the fact that the post is now gone suggests they've been making their feelings known. With full release, the void between Standard and Ultimate players might not actually mean anything, but there's certainly still some animosity lurking.

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.