The Realm of Trials, according to the Diablo Wiki, is a Diablo 3 mini-game that awards Greater Rift Keystones to those who play it. The more waves a player finishes, the higher the level of key granted, enabling players to enter the Greater Rifts at a higher level. It sounds simple enough, but apparently nobody likes them. Not even Blizzard.
"The Trials are not good. We don't like them. I don't like them," Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng said during a Westmarch Workshop broadcast on Twitch (transcribed by Reddit). And while he described their presence as "part of the natural iteration process," he also stated very clearly that their time is up.
"Trials will be getting removed from the game," he continued. "I can't tell you when. I can tell you that we already don't have Trials in our internal builds. We've been playing around with it and testing it, and we are committed to removing them."
Cheng said there's more to the job than just cutting Trials out, however. He described how players could be "incentivized" to enter Greater Rifts of a higher level than they're comfortable with in order to upgrade their legendary gems. "And it's going to be an absolutely terrible run, it takes 30-40 minutes to clear, but you do it anyway because that's how you get your 60 percent chance to upgrade your gem rather than a two percent chance," he explained.
Despite that, he reaffirmed Blizzard's commitment to dropping Trials—which means that everyone can stop asking about it now. "We've gutted Trials internally, we're working on it, there were some issues, it had a bunch of downstream effects, and we are still working on it," he said. "Asking for them to be removed isn't going to make it happen any faster. I wish it could! If I could make it happen faster I would say everyone should talk about it all the time, but, you know what, everyone talks about it all the time already, and unfortunately it just doesn't speed up how fast we can get them out."
