Why Diablo Immortal beta players don't want to level up

techradar.com:

Diablo is a series all about killing hordes of monsters to harvest them for XP and powerful loot, so Blizzard knew it had a problem when players in the Diablo Immortal beta were actively avoiding leveling up.

The strange behavior is a reaction to a system Blizzard is trying to perfect. It wants Diablo Immortal to be a game people play together, it is an MMO, after all. For people to buddy up and take on challenges as a group, they need to be roughly the same level as one another. However, how do you keep people at similar levels if you’re only able to play for an hour a day whereas one of your friends can play for five?

What Blizzard has come up with is the World Paragon system. “We want to make sure friends who play different amounts of time each day can still always play together as a team, instead of the strong players ‘carrying’ the weaker ones,” Diablo Immortal’s senior system designer Kris Zierhut explains in a blog post.

Once you reach the maximum level in Diablo Immortal, you begin earning Paragon Levels, each level gives you access to improved loot and lets you progress along the Paragon Trees. To stop players with more time racing ahead, Blizzard has given each Diablo Immortal server a World Paragon Level that increases by two each day. If you’re below that level then you get increased experience, letting you level up faster. The counter to this is if you’re a higher level then you get reduced experience, slowing your progress and stopping you from getting too far ahead of other players.

In effect, Blizzard is penalizing you for playing the game too much.

The system worked, though, keeping players broadly close to one another’s levels, allowing them to party up without one player carrying another.

The problem came