this is the biggest scam I have ever heard... blizzard selling their own pixel goods for cash and completely controlling their own rmt. they totally broke the economy a full year before game release.
/em claps "bravo, blizzard, bravo...
o.o; Interesting! Still very excited for D3 but I'm not so sure how much money I'd be throwing at Blizzard, lol. I was glad to read there would be 2 different AHs, wouldn't be very bright of them not to do so.
I'm not sure what the problem is... back in the day I remember farming D2 items and putting them directly on eBay. I'd sell stone of jordans in bulk >.> and I made well over $2,000 before they decided to tell eBay to start pulling the auctions. Making it official just gets rid of the black market where people get scammed (hi2u EGS) and pay ridiculous markups because of the high risk involved.
The down side of this however is that when a company can directly profit off of it's own game's RMT, there is higher incentive to make items that are extremely powerful (and extremely rare), that the majority of the community "must" buy, else never obtain.
This coupled with the obvious "hey buy this Xmas item we're releasing everyone" like they've done with WoW makes me a bit frustrated.
However, the game will at a minimum be amazing just to play through in single player mode (or with a friend), and at a maximum a blast to play online for months.
If only they'd pick a release day so FFXI can finally die.
It requires a constant internet connection to. One of the things I used to love about Diablo 2 was being able to just pop it on a laptop and take it with me anywhere.
I still load it up time and time again to play single player offline. Guess that won't happen in Diablo 3, seeing as how I'm not going to drop $ on something that won't have the same. There's also talks of them outright not making it able to be modded..
I just see this as wrong and besides if you dont play hardcore you are lame and if you spend real money on items that you are gonna lose during a lagburst you are really lame. I think the game looks amazing tho on a side note.
The in-game constant online is really to prevent people from hacking and duping of items.
As for fake blizzard.net servers, it won't happen. I remember there was a fake blizzard.net server for Warcraft 3 for beta, and the people that setup the server lost the court battle because they copied blizzards server code and was forced to shut down.