Whoops! Diablo 3 Season 33 accidentally ended early and is back online — mostly

We usually don’t have much warning to the end of a Diablo 3 season, but we get something, right? That’s the question players were asking themselves on Sunday, January 5, when the EU and Asia Season 33 realms went down, followed by the NA realm — routing seasonal characters to eternal realms with emailed stashes and all. Now, almost everything appears to be back online as expected, but what exactly happened, and why was there an unexpected (and ultimately rolled back) season end?

Thus began Global Community Director Adam “PezRadar” Fletcher’s initial investigation, with the above posted to the Diablo 3 forums on Sunday, January 5 at 6:19 pm eastern after 50 posts of complaints about the sudden season end (and presumably a similar slew of posts across social media platforms). The initial reporter commented at 2:50 am eastern that they were playing on the Asia seasonal realm and received an alert that the season would end at the top of the hour — which presumably would have been 3:00 am eastern / midnight pacific. This began a chain of unannounced season ends across the day: eight hours later, EU players received the notification, and right on cue a notification popped for NA players at 7:30 pm eastern / 4:30 pm pacific (Seasons start and end in the US at 5:00 pm pacific).

Just a few minutes after NA players received the shutdown notice, Fletcher provided the following update in the forums:

Fast-forward a bit — the EU and KR dedicated seasonal realms were back up and running about an hour and a half later. NA followed suit, and as of this article, only some console players may still be in seasonal limbo. But how the heck did this happen?

Well, remember Season 32, and how its original end date coincided with a tiny, unimportant event called the launch of Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred? Yep, it was originally targeted to end on October 6 — just a day before VoH opened up for the global player base. This also set the start of Season 33 for October 11, creating a potential conflict for the Diablo community. Blizzard is pretty good about trying to avoid franchise conflicts like that; instead, they launched a PTR in September to test client updates for Mac and PC players. Voila, extra two weeks. So, if Season 33 had started on October 11, when would it have ended?

If you guessed January 5, you win a prize! The prize is being technically correct — the best kind of correct.

We’re still expecting Season 33 to end on February 2, for the same reasons: ending in two weeks on January 20 bumps right against the new D4 season starting on January 21. But at least now, we assume we’ll get more heads up than 30 minutes. (Hopefully!) We’re likely to see an official announcement on the next Diablo 3 season in a couple of weeks.