Diablo 3 - RMT goes legal

If you start a multiplayer Session of Diablo 2 today, you will notice something equally curious and unnerving: Every couple of minutes, random bots will join your game and start advertising websites, which sell powerful weapons and armor for cash. So powerful, in fact, that many people could spend an entire lifetime hoping to acquire them with absolutely no luck.

One has to wonder how the creators of these websites manage to get their hands on entire piles of such mighty artifacts. But one thing is for sure - even over a decade after the initial release of Diablo 2, spammers, botters and goldsellers are making a ton of money with the crap they advertise so aggressively, it has ruined large parts of the battle.net experience.

As a consequence, Diablo 3 will feature a mechanism so evil and (from Blizzard's point of view) so brilliant, it melts the brain: Legally buy and sell items for cash on the auction house. Is this gonna get rid of the spam-bots? Most likely. Will this put an end to cheaters, who will always find means and ways to create shit-tons of all the powerful gear you could never get your hands on unless you quit your day job and devoted your life to item farming? Yeah, right...

For Blizzard, this actually a pretty sweet deal - they know they can't stop the farmers and goldsellers, so instead of preventing them from doing their dirty deeds, they now offer them a platform and get their own nice, big cut out of it. You, however, are about to get fucked. And not in a nice way, either.

Think about it: People spend TONS of money for vanity pets, mounts and other shit on the Blizzard shop to kit out their toons on WoW. Will they spend 20, 30, 50 Euros for epix on Diablo 3? Fuck, yes! "Pay 2 Win" all around. And either you pay up, as well, or you won't stay competitive.
"Nope", you might say. "I'm just gonna play for fun and won't care about cool items." Right. Let's see how much fun you're gonna have when every idiot around you is showing off their awesome gear and when that shit is all over the auction house. You *CAN'T* ignore it, because you CAN'T play offline. Neat, huh?

And there's yet another problem right there: A huge part of the fun behind the Diablo games lies in the never-ending hunt for ever more powerful gear. Now you can legally buy a shortcut, get all the most powerful stuff right off the real-money-auction house and that's where the fun ends. What are you gonna do when your toon is capped out and you have all the stuff you ever wanted?

And don't even think that *you* could possibly ever make some real money with this system. There are whole legions of goldsellers out there, farming 24 hours a day, botting, cheating, exploiting in every way they can. They will flood the auction house, they set the price and they control the market. Nobody is gonna by your Booger-encrusted Leather Jerkin of the Noob +3. 

Remember when you just paid for a game ONCE and then just played it and had fun with it? No fucking expensive DLC, no monthly fees, no added bells and whistles, which cost you a truckload of money? Well, move along, because Diablo 3 is not going to be that game.

-Cat