Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Season 1, 2.4 Update Now Launching In April

Diablo II: Resurrected players have been waiting for some time now to get access to the first Ladder season of the remake. While the 2.4 update planned to launch Ladder play was slated to launch before the end of the month, Blizzard has revealed it has been pushed back. Instead, the update is now slated to arrive on April 14, with Ladder Season 1's launch coming two weeks later.

A forum post from Blizzard acknowledged the long wait and the inevitable "here we go again" reaction to another delay. It goes on to explain that a number of issues were uncovered following a recent maintenance period that had not appeared on the Public Test Realm version of the game. As a result, changes had to be rolled back to prevent problems with creating and joining games, stashes not converting, and other errors.

More maintenance will be coming on March 29, but Blizzard said it believes the problems will be resolved and that the 2.4 update will launch on April 14. The first Ladder season will begin on April 28. The extra wait for Ladder play is meant to "give the team time to react to any further unforeseen issues that may arise on PC and consoles from deploying the 2.4 patch itself and ensure the smoothest possible Ladder Season 1 start."

In Diablo II, Ladder seasons serve as a competitive aspect of the game, as players would have to create fresh characters (with no access to shared items from existing ones) to compete to make their way up the ladder. Ladders would run for a period of months, at which point those characters would be converted into non-ladder characters. The first of these debuted in 2003, and despite the original game's age, these seasons have actually been continuing for the last two decades, leading up to the launch of Resurrected.

The 2.4 update was recently tested on the PTR, and it does more than just pave the way for Ladder seasons. It includes various adjustments and even adds new Rune Words.