If you purchase legendary crests, you are not Diablo IV Gold buying a single roll of dice like the case with a FIFA Ultimate Team card pack such as. You are purchasing a chance to play with the dice, to get into the game engine and tweak the drop rates (slightly) in your favor.
These addictive gaming mechanics aren't isolated from the addictive gameplay mechanics. Instead, they are linked directly into combat and loot drops inside the game. Diablo is uniquely well-positioned to achieve this. As my colleague Maddy Myers pointed out, these games heavily focused on loot always had a slot-machine feel which Diablo Immortal's model of business makes the game appear as if it were.
Blizzard has been at pains to highlight that the monetization of Immortal can be ignored until the final game and it's true and claims that the vast majority gamers enjoy the game without spending even a cent, which is feasible. However, it's not true that the greatest enjoyment in Diablo games lies in playing through the story rather than maxing out your character.
It's just as untrue to say that the games have always been engineered to engender an obsession with hitting the power level of their players. If you have a predisposition towards addiction to gambling, toward the addictive qualities of Diablo's Item gameor, more importantly and both of them -- the crest system of old is exploitative and potentially very damaging.
For everyone else this makes Diablo more difficult to play.
We've been there before and we've been there before, or at least somewhere similar to it. When Diablo 3 first came out in 2012, it included an auction house using real money, where players could purchase and sell their items. In theory, the auction house was in place to head off the cheating and scamming that beset trade during Diablo 2.
In order to steer players toward Auction House, Blizzard dropped the loot rate in the game to such an level that the ability to equip your character became a thankless grind and the game as was uninteresting to play. When the unpopular auction house was removed and drop rates increase in 2014 Diablo 3 instantly became more fun, even before the changes of The Reaper of Souls expansion raised the cheap Diablo 4 Gold game to a classic level.