Originally posted by Foxglovez:

My crystal ball is showing only murkiness.
No one in this forum knows anything, nope, nada, nuthin. This is a steam forum, you might get more information from their discord chats or reddit even. It's EA, so no matter what they have done in the past, it may not be the same in the future. One of these days they may even do a complete wipe. So, though we all have opinions, in this case they are just that...

they might force a seed restart but your character skills and gear will stay with you for good.

however the new difficulty modes might FORCE a reset in the end to not be easy to abuse. depends on how they implement them of course.