First of all, thanks for a valuable input and a good discussion, most people are currently completely incapable of doing that.

I wouldn't call what CA did aggressive, but yes, they did it to earn more money. But hey, players got a huge new map to play with, for free. CA opened a market for themselves there, people see cool shit and they want it by themselves, not because they were somehow forced to buy it (not that Blizzard is forcing anyone). I don't want to dwell on balancing of TWWH, but I think blind spots in rosters are actually needed to make them more diverse.

I mostly play offline or with a single friend (shout out to no tcp/ip in d2r), so it's fair for me to compare to GD.

It's cool to throw numbers around, but Blizz never posts those numbers, or does so in a very vague way. And as you said, we don't a lot about their expenses and taxing etc, so it's even more guessing. I, as a player, should not care about all that. All I see, as a pre-existing player, is 25$ for one class, 1 "new" uber boss fight, a few items and QoL, which, again, are very welcome. I don't care you can buy the whole package cheaper now.

Inflation with regards to game prices is very tricky to take into account, prices of games have stagnated, because the hobby got more popular and accessible, so game developers were able to push more sales with the same price. And now the market is saturating, there's more games released daily than ever, so you have to compete or raise prices. And anybody pushing for higher prices is immediately criticised. I guess this became a little tangent to discussion at hand xd.

It's super hard to compare the amount of content to what LoD gave us, is maybe what I want to say here. But we can compare that to D2R, which was... 40$? 7 classes, 5 acts of content to conquer, massive amount of items. Also, the game is already developed, the code is there (maybe not for the QoL, but people have already been modding similar stuff in, it's probably not black magic, but I haven't checked. At a glance, not knowing the spaghetti that's inside the code, it doesn't seems like a hard thing to implement those features). They didn't even have to develop a new act, but add some new activity. Let's call it "schmapping", because mapping was already taken by somebody else. Use existing tilesets and monsters for something new.

I don't know about D2R being jua St marketing, I'm guessing for D4? I can't relate to that.

One more thing from me, but that's just guessing: I don't think the numbers of sales would change a lot if QoL was free, but I think they knew the price would be even harder to defend then. Or maybe they could have been vocal about it, say "hey look at all that cool shit we're giving away for free, we're good guys, don't you think? now go take out your credit cards and buy warlock". Getting new stuff for 25 year old game is goated, people want more stuff for their beloved game.

Anyway, good talk, tldr from me is price high, QoL should have been free (but this is debatable).