Many industry professionals had their eyes on Reaper of Souls as well.
Everybody knew about Diablo's crippling decline. Players and designers alike were trying to figure out how to reverse the process and extend Diablo's life, but nothing conclusive was reached.
Many suggestions pitched by players or designers were quickly shut down by others. These suggestions would always entail changing the core of Diablo or make it decline faster.
As a hack and slash game, it was natural that people would get bored of it quickly.
And in the eyes of many designers, there was nothing that could be done as in order to solve the problem, the core of the game must be changed, which would obviously affect how fun the game was.
The pros and cons of a game like this were two sides of the same coin, and improvements difficult to implement.
But nobody expected Chen Mo to double down on the hack and slash element of the game.