Hello everybody!
We are working on a new difficulty mode called season mode. The idea is to give long time players a new incentive to come back to the game and to reduce the power discrepancy between old and new players. To achieve that we plan to make the new mode independent from all existing difficulty modes. That means that characters who pick the new season mode can't access XP/Gold/Shards/Items from characters that use a different mode. This restriction just affects the new mode though. Characters without the mode can still use all items, even items that did drop on the new mode. To make things a bit more transparent we will add an item property which shows if the item dropped on the new mode. Maybe we also add a leaderboard where you can see who has the highest leveled character on the new mode at the moment.
After some time - maybe a year or so - we might end the season and start a new one. All characters created for the previous season become regular characters then and all their items loose the season property. So for the next season everybody has to start with fresh characters but you can still keep all the stuff you found for your non-season characters.
In trade for the drawbacks the new mode will come with some bonuses and penalties:
[*] 5 extra attribute points (like the current power mode)
[*] 15% magic find
[*] some XP penalty
[*] New runewords that just work on the new mode
[*] New items that just drop on the new mode
[*] Increase death penalty
If you have further ideas, please let us know! We could also introduce a hardcore mode with permanent death if you like.
Brumm