When former Diablo Immortal Closed Alpha testers launch the app today, they will encounter a new message that wasn’t there before: “This account has expired. Do you want to create another account?”

Answering “OK” will prompt a Battle.net EULA and Agreement page that you can reject or agree to. Once you agree, you are taken to the lobby as usual, but there is a second change.

Up until now, Diablo Immortal Closed Alpha characters were still present in our phone files — those of us who participated in the testing. If you had your Google Play setting to auto-install new Diablo Immortal updates, then when you launch the game, and click on servers you will notice “My Characters” tab no longer exists. This means there was a character wipe pushed in a recent update.

  • BEFORE
  • NOW

But there is more to this. There is precedent of this happening before. Read after the break.

Back on April 20 (11:16am EST), I posted an update to my April 15 article titled “A Sign Diablo Immortal Test #2 is Nigh.” This is what I discovered that day:

“The character list had been present in the Diablo Immortal client after the tech alpha ended until today. The character list has been wiped.”

Sounds familiar?

Diablo Immortal Closed Alpha started next day on April 21, 2021.

It is difficult to say whether this character wipe means that Diablo Immortal Beta is coming this week, or the next, or next month. But if you read my recent article “Guess-timating Diablo Immortal Beta” — you will find reasons to believe we are close to another precedent.

It took Blizzard approximately 84-91 days to launch technical alpha after the Internal Company Playtest ended. Day 84 since Closed Alpha ended is this upcoming September 17, 2021. Day 91 is September 24.

Don’t hold your breath, though. There might be another explanation for this character wipe on the Google Play side, or a different reason. Inquiring minds need to know.

I will continue to monitor any signs of Beta, or whether Blizzard PR reaches out to me about participating in the test. Follow @blizzplanetcom for updates.

UPDATE 4:25pm EST — Unsure if the Closed Alpha server side configuration was held outside Battle.net in closed alpha, but I can now confirm that the current app update points to a Battle.net production environment.

This can mean anything. Only for developer-side testing, or it could be related to Battle.net ID integration. We’ll find out sooner or later.

3:04am EST — StayPro informs me that mysteriously the Australian server went online. He just isn’t able to login. This happened just less than 24 hours after I posted about the character wipe. You can see the AU server lit a green dot which means: “online.” The server is currently offline, some time after within 10 minutes of its discovery. The question is… why was it online briefly? Are they preparing servers for Beta?

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