One Diablo character runs live on a server. Anyone watching can vote on what he does next, and every couple of seconds the most popular choice is the one he actually takes. Nobody is in charge. That is the whole game.
Three groups. Where he moves, what he does, and where he goes — the last of these being the one that changes the level, which is the only truly irreversible thing the crowd can decide.
North is up the screen, not up the map. Diablo's world is drawn on a diamond grid turned 45°, so the tile directions and the screen directions disagree. The buttons follow what you can see — press N and he walks toward the top of the picture. That is the only version anyone can reason about at a glance.
Everything in this group addresses the nearest thing rather than one you choose. Picking a specific chest out of four means clicking that chest, and clicking is the one thing a crowd cannot do — so every control here is a verb, not a target.
Votes are collected in two-second windows. When a window closes, the option with the most votes wins and is sent to the game. The ring next to this window on the front page is the countdown, so you can see how long you have.
The banner under the picture always shows the order that is currently standing, in plain language — "Marched north-east", "DESCENDED". It stays until a new decision replaces it, so if you look away you have not missed what he was told to do.
A greyed-out button is not a broken page. It means the game itself says that move is not available right now, and the site is only reporting it. The hint text beside each group says which:
The site never works out for itself whether he is near the stairs. It asks the game and repeats the answer, because a second copy of that rule would eventually disagree with the real one — and then the button would be lying to you.
Combat is not put to a vote. A monster can kill him in about a second and a half; a voting window is two seconds. Anything that has to outrun a skeleton cannot be decided by a committee, so he picks his own targets, swings on his own, and drinks a potion when he drops below half health.
There is one consequence worth knowing, because it looks like a bug and is not:
While something is right on top of him, movement votes are ignored. Tapping a direction mid-fight cancels the approach he had already worked out, and he ends up shuffling on the spot taking free hits. So within about two tiles of a monster, the crowd's directions wait.
Level changes are never ignored. If the crowd decides a room is unwinnable, it can always leave — that is the one call his own instincts have no business overriding.
Where he goes is yours. Whether he defends himself is not.
The walk to buttons set a destination, not a step. He keeps walking there across as many voting windows as it takes, using the game's own pathfinding, so you do not have to keep voting for the same thing forty times to cross a room.
Pressing any direction cancels it — a crowd that starts steering has changed its mind about where he was going. Taking a staircase cancels it too, since tile coordinates mean something completely different on the next level down.
His armour is not earned, it is bought — by the market, not by him. As the token's market cap climbs he is visibly re-equipped, rung by rung: rags → chain → plate → gothic → full plate. If it falls back, so does he.
The thresholds are quoted in dollars, but graduation is fixed in SOL. That means a rally in SOL makes the gear ladder genuinely easier to climb, and a slump makes it harder, without anyone changing anything. This is a known and deliberate property of anchoring to graduation rather than to a round dollar figure — not a bug, and worth knowing before you read anything into a tier change.
He dies constantly. That is expected — a character played by a committee is a character that walks into things.
Each death opens a window of about thirty minutes. Anyone can pay to raise him, and he comes back in full armour at whatever tier the market has reached. If nobody pays, the treasury covers it from banked fees for as long as it can. When neither a person nor the treasury raises him, the season is over.
The revive price is deliberately small — the point is that raising him is an impulse anyone can act on, not a decision only a whale can make. The live figure is always on the front page; treat that as the authority over anything written here.
A season ends on indifference, not on a number. There is no difficulty setting that kills the run. He gets there eventually if people keep caring. The only way it ends badly is that one day nobody bothers.
You can pay to silence the crowd and drive him yourself for ninety seconds. Everyone else's votes are still collected and still shown — you can watch the crowd disagree with you in real time — but yours are the ones that move him.
A season runs from the moment the treasury has enough to open one until either Diablo dies or nobody will pay to raise the warrior.
Winning is a promotion, not an ending. Kill Diablo and the next season runs on Nightmare, then Hell. The character resets to level one and the gear rebuilds from the market — but the record persists, and the headline record is fewest deaths to clear. Depth stops being interesting the first time anyone finishes; "cleared it in 131 deaths" is a number that can always be beaten.
Between seasons he waits in town while the treasury refills. That gap is not dead air — it is the funding drive for the next run.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo and all related marks belong to Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. TITHE runs on DevilutionX, an open-source reimplementation of the 1996 engine.