Hungering Moon Event … A Disappointment

Blizzard Entertainment enabled the first Diablo Immortal seasonal event this past weekend. The Hungering Moon had players complete a few objectives to earn moonslivers — a currency used to purchase Moon Blessings from the Hungering Moon UI.

Once you have earned 7 blessings, it unlocks access to the Moon’s Favor which rewards a Legendary Crest, Rare Crests x 3 and 25 Aspirant’s Keys for your Legacy of the Horadrim shrine.

This event lasted from July 15 – 17, 2022. It could be accessed from the Menu, below the Battle Pass card.

Hungering Moon Event Overview

Serve the moon to collect Moonslivers. Obtain 7 of its Blessings and you will earn the Hungering Moon’s Favor.

Complete objectives to earn Moonslivers that can be used to earn blessings in the form of rewards. Earning 7 blessings will unlock the final reward in the form of the Moon’s Favor.

PROBABILITIES

• 49% chance to obtain: 1 Random Legendary Item, 25 Aspirant’s Keys.
• 51% Chance to obtain: 65,000 Gold, 7 Enchanted Dust, 110 Scrap Materials, 5 Glowing Shards, 8 Enchanted Dust, 90 Scrap Materials, 55,000 Gold.

Below is an image of the Blessings Tab where you can see all the rewards for each Blessing. The way this worked is that when you had at least 20 Moonslivers (currency) and clicked the Draw button, you would see a wheel-of-fortune-like animation rotating around each of the reward cards until it landed on a random reward. Once that reward is checkmarked, the next time you clicked the Draw button it wouldn’t count that last reward, and thus the chances for one of the other rewards to be randomly selected increased.

How to obtain Moonslivers: Service

There was a daily service and a devoted service. Service is a fancy word to say Objectives.

DAILY SERVICE

• Complete an Elder Rift (0/1) — 10 Moonslivers
• Earn 40 Battle Points (0/40) — 10 Moonslivers

DEVOTED SERVICE

• Level up twice (0/2) — 20 Moonslivers
• Log in for 2 consecutive days (0/2) — 10 Moonslivers
• Kill 1,000 monsters (0/1000) — 20 Moonslivers
• Kill 100 Elite Monsters (0/100) — 40 Moonslivers

You could probably get 5/7 Blessings on the first day easily. The last two blessings were more tricky because you only had two sources of Moonslivers at that point: the Daily Service. Complete an Elder Rift and Earn 40 Battle Points together rewards a total of 20 Moonslivers per day in the second and third day of the event.

Moon’s Favor

After looting the 7th Blessing, the Moon’s Favor tab becomes unlocked showing a treasure chest with 3 rewards:

• Legendary Crest
• Rare Crest x 3
• Aspirant’s Keys x 25

Manure

Strong word. My apologies. Here is why this Hungering Moon seasonal event does not meet the expected Blizzard Entertainment quality for:

• A) a Diablo franchise RPG game; and
• B) an MMORPG

The basic thing about a seasonal event should be that these are integral part of the Diablo story. The first strike in this baseball game is there is absolutely no narrative, no Hungering Moon event questline intro, no cutscenes, no NPC, no canon reason to participate in the Hungering Moon event.

This is a failure of great magnitude for a mobile game with the “Diablo” moniquer in its title, on its second month of life.

We have a great and professionally designed artwork for the Hungering Moon. But we don’t know anything about that male character. Is it a Druid? I see the deer skull, the wolf teeth, and branchy-staff, hood, cape, and collar motiffs that hint at a Druid — but it could be something else. We were never given the opportunity to meet an actual NPC in the game to talk to, and learn his story and the reason he is in the game.

We don’t know if he is a druid, former druid, a cultist of some kind, what is the Hungering Moon? Any lore. Are there others like him? Is it a new faction?

There was no introductory questline like there was for the Dawn of Damnation event in Beta. Even that was underwhelming and lasted a few quests, and never again got NPC dialogues once it got us into completing event objectives.

Overall, I criticized the Dawn of Damnation event in Beta for its repetitive objectives that were a copy/paste of 3 basic objectives + random zone. Only one of the Dawn of Damnation Event objectives actually had demons spawning in a random zone with only 3 demons — an outcry considering the event was supposed to be a Burning Hell invasion upon Sanctuary. There was nothing unique or interesting about Dawn of Damnation. Instead, the objectives relied on content we already play daily. Nothing new spawned in the zones. No NPCs. No quests. Nothing beyond the intro.

Well, I didn’t think there would be a worse event than that, but here we are. Hungering Moon.

The rewards are somewhat good, and I would welcome events that give us this type of rewards, or even better rewards; but this is a Diablo game and it is a MMORPG. We need a reason to start these seasonal events. By reason, I mean we need lore. We need NPC interactions. We need to learn about the world. We need also continuity with Diablo II: Lord of Destruction whenever possible.

The developers are getting now a great stream of money from monetization. We deserve better content than this.

We need new Elite Quests, more often. It is been now a month and a half. No second set of Elite Quests. No continuation to the base story, yet.

I found it disappointing that there was no Dawn of Damnation event in the first month of Diablo Immortal going live. Fighting Skarn in the first month was also disappointing. It could have been left for the third month of launch as we go through the Dawn of Damnation event that never saw the light post-launch, building up a crescendo of attacks from the Burning Hells upon Sanctuary.

Instead, I killed Skarn within the first week, and now in the middle of Hell 3 difficulty I keep finding the content repetitive, and stagnant.

On to the second reason Hungering Moon was a terrible designed event. It lasted only 3 days, and in a weekend no less. Most people who blasts through Diablo Immortal content reaches their Battle Point weekly cap around Friday. Guess what? The “Service” requires you to earn 40 Battle Points. Once you reach your weekly Battle Point cap, you can earn NO Battle Points until Monday when the server resets.

That means many people welcomed the Hungering Moon seasonal event with reaching the weekly Battle Point cap and being unable to complete the “Earn 40 Battle Points” service to acquire 10 Moonslivers. Which means some people were not able to get the 7th Blessing for the Moon’s Favor.

I was extremely lucky to have completed the event before I hit the weekly Battle Point cap. But as a fansite writer, it is my job to also be open-minded about other players and their needs. I have reached the Battle Point cap on a Friday or earlier while playing in past tests after playing 8+ hours. Post-Launch, I have been playing less than 4 hours a day, but still managed to reach the cap.

These events should never force objectives that interact with daily or weekly caps in such ways. F on design. We expect better from what was once Blizzard Entertainment. Let’s continue that legacy of quality. Gameplay first.

That weekly battle point cap, by the way, needs to be increased to 3200 or something adequate for people who have extra time to play, so they can also be able to play on the weekends.

What it should be…

Taite is currently an NPC in the lower portion of Westmarch who provides Elite Quests (one-time) and Side Quests (daily). Taite could be our to-go NPC for future Special Events or Seasonal Events. She is one who hears whispers about adventures going on around the world of Sanctuary. So it is fitting that Taite hears about NPCs located in X Zone who may need adventurers such as us; or ask us to investigate a mysterious person in an isolated camp.

That NPC can start a narrative about him/her/themselves, a bit of story or lore about their event and their objectives. An intro questline of maybe 10-12 quests. This unlocks access to their event shop/rewards.

Every day, we get 2-3 follow up quests, then move on to completing objectives (services). Toward the end of the event, we get a closure statements from the NPC to wrap up the lore. Now are these one-time events that will never happen again or are these happening a few times per yer, or yearly? I am not clear on this yet.

Events should happen throughout 1-2 weeks. 3 days is too low. If you are not home a weekend, or don’t have signal, you are pretty much locked out of the weekend event or its rewards.

It could be beneficial for players to know this type of things beforehand from Blizzard.

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