I never dealt with the real money action house but I used the normal one a lot as when you learned how it worked you could easily score better items there than grinding as grinding takes time no matter how good you're.

As for the prices, I never saw an item that high. Even for 5 to 10 euro you could score an item relatively powerful but since I stopped playing before PVP patch and didn't play competitively it didn't bother me as much as it would, it's rather a personal game as opposed to a MMO. I would be more bothered in a MMO.

And yes, it's kind of stupid, I suppose it's more of a ego/pride thing than anything else. If anything, accepted "cheats" are the worse kind because then you have nothing to argue against e.g skills and talents. ;)

It's not about nostalgia glasses, it's more about drop rate tweaks thru updates. So let say if some items can be gained from killing monsters with a decent percentage of drop rate(like.... what we did with all kind of RPGs in the past, whoah!) and we don't need to use RMAH then in the next update Blizzard can easily tweak the drop rate or the enemy's strength/difficulty so it's far harder to get the item and forcing us to use RMAH.

So in the end it's pretty hard to maintain balanced fun video game if they keep tweaking stuff for the sake of getting money in every updates.

I mistyped change, I meant 'change'. Just want to clarify that.

Anyway, I agree with that but considering it's an online game and now that the game has PVP balance will always change because it's apparently better to keep some characters stronger so some have fun with the advantage then they just roll different characters or items every balance change rather than using a simple system where balance doesn't need to be so heavily tweaked too often.

But as for actually forcing people to use RMAH I don't believe that, I never used it and I never needed too and I think a large minority actually didn't bother with RMAH even on principles. In fact, you could get by all the way up until Inferno rather easily even without normal AH, but during Inferno utilizing AH is a great advantage.

That's like saying Siamese twins are different people. There may be some truth in that, but you still can't ask one to leave the room while you fuck the other. Sales and DRM are intrinsically linked subjects.

Actually, there is. I don't know if, how much or when (meaning "which patch") you played Diablo 3. We can skip versions 1.01 (broken wizard force armor and insane Demon Hunter damage), 1.02 (Act 2 flies?) and 1.03 (ridiculous monsters regeneration and gold sinking for ripairs), but overall, after the end of Inferno, Act 1, there is no sense of progression from a "heroic" point of view.
This feeling is widespread, and I think it's real: the game was planned with the (RM)AH in mind (we all know what it means: useless loot) and by choosing not to use this "feature" you had to wander for hours hoping in a decent loot.

It's interesting to see what the GOG community thinks of Diablo 3.

As per the wishlist at this point in time:

- Diablo = 14452 votes
- Diablo II = 11196 votes
- Diablo 3 = 218 votes

If DRM was the only problem with Diablo 3, I'd expect it to have a lot more votes here.

I'm guessing that Diablo has more votes than Diablo II as it's more difficult to source. And the copy protection has been officially patched out of Diablo 2 so there's less need for it to be here. That said, despite owning Diablo II and 3 copies of the expansion, I'd probably still buy a GOG version to have the convenience of re-installing the game using a simple GOG installer file rather than working my way through a bunch of CDs.

It seems like everyone forgets that Closed Battle.net (the one that wasn't completely full of hacked characters) was essentially Online Only. The difference between D2 and D3 is D2 you could play an offline character that you couldn't take onto Closed Battle.net, so it was more useful for screwing around with builds (unnecessary in D3) or for LANs.

However, as another poster mentioned, we also know that Diablo 2 sold 17 million (and the expansion sold another 17.5 million). While it's not necessarily fair to compare a game that's been out for 13 years with one that's only been out for a bit over a year and a half, the sales for Diablo 3 seem to be dropping off rapidly (for the numbers I could find the sales in 2013 are currently only 10% of the sales in 2012). Not to mention that the size of the potential customer base is significantly larger now compared to when D2 was released (plus D3 had the momentum of D2 driving its initial sales). What will be somewhat telling is looking at the sales numbers for the expansion once it comes out, to see if D3 as it currently stands looks to have anywhere near the kind of momentum that D2 had.

Of course, the difficult is teasing out what effects the online-only aspect of the game has on all of this vs the impact that the rest of the game's design decision had. But it should also be kept in mind that the online-only decision was linked with other design decisions (auction house, and the resulting tuning of certain game mechanics, so it's not as if these variables exist completely independent of each other).

What would be quite telling is if Blizzard drops the online-only requirement in the near future, as that would pretty much be an admission from them that is wasn't having the effect they wanted. So I'll be watching with a bit of interest in the months following the release of the expansion (yes, I know Blizzard has stated they won't be removing the requirement, but I'll let you guess how much stock I put in words from their PR department).

It's not just the sold copies that matter: Diablo II is almost universally considered a milestone, as the game per se or in its genre. Diablo III? Meh. In the long run, the "meh" status of Diablo III will fucking hurt Blizzard in the nuts.
Err, what?

Thanks.
Heh, it's a classic case of form being better than substance. I would have liked the opposite.

"Please note that the shutdown will occur on March 18, 2014. We will keep everyone informed as we work through this process."

well it does look like forcing a campaign to milk more cash until then

Well, yes I'm an Italian guy, but not an average one; I'm an atheist and I don't give a flying fuck about the pope or the entire Christianity in the world. So yes, you could say that I am a bit of anti-Catholic deep inside me :-P

You can register your key on Battle.net and download it from there, patched to the latest version.

It's not the latest version. The installer uses version 1.12a, while the current one is 1.13d.

Oops.