Damn, was looking forward to this one. But there is absolutely no way I will buy it without being able to play offline.

I'll spend my money elsewhere, thanks Blizzard.

Don't commit a crime in China, just don't. Blizzard have effectively legalized gold farming so those sweat shops are going to be recruiting big time.

Elaborate

You know what's funny here? They thought about this exact problem when they developed Diablo 2. Their solution was to have 'open' multiplayer games that allowed single-player characters and 'closed' games that did not, not to make it an online-only game.

SC2's stupid DRM, especially the connect every 30 days part, was already very hard to swallow, I gave them some slack because of the fact they removed DRM/copy protection from their older games, but a full fledged Ubi DRM is going too far, and the retarded excuse they are using doesn't help at all.

I might be the only one but I don't give a damn about the multiplayer part of either Starcraft II (haven't played online since the beta) nor Diablo 3 (never played neither Diablo 1 nor 2 online) so if the solo character can only be used solo than that's perfectly fine for me.

Kotick...

How can I? It's rather simple. The gold farmers that plague all MMO's will flock to this because they can now do what they do legally. On paper it sounds nice with Blizzard giving you the option to sell your stuff for real money but in practice it will be abused by gold farmers because they can sit playing Diablo III for 16 hours a day to accumulate all the gold and items to sell legally in the Diablo III store. Of course Blizzard will now also be taking a cut of the profits. It's a genius move by Blizzard really, introduce F2P monetization to a $60 game, they will need another tower to store all their money in.

Sale lost. This kind of rubbish is always a deal breaker for me as although I accept companies want to protect their games this is idiotic. I see no reasonable excuse for not using the same system as Diablo 2 where you had separate Battlenet and offline characters. I always found Battlenet unusable so stuck to single player with some LAN games and was hoping to do the same with D3. Now I have to break it my mates that we won't be getting the band back together as I just won't be willing to cough up my hard earned cash for this.

Well it seems that you've never played D2, but exactly like I said in my post in the other thread (having two threads for one discussion is annoying), D2 is already riddled with item shops. At least now it will be 'official' and maybe we can get some kind of regulation, i.e. players not getting ripped off. So what's so different really? In any case, the vast majority of items will be going for pennies anyway once the game picks up.


Now going back to the original discussion - despite being a raving Blizzard fanboy, I condemn this move.
1) Mods in D2 were great. They ranged from making completely new settings and worlds to changing very small things in the game (personally, I made one for myself that changed the name colours of runes to Unique [golden] and rejuv pots to purple).
The issue obviously is that since Blizzard stopped adding new content to the game, patches became extremely infrequent, thus it was up to the community to fix shit. This was done through mods.
The obvious drawback was that it was stupidly easy to hack certain aspects of the game. I.e. breakpoint hack.

2) Server downtime. Starcraft II and WoW servers go down for maintenance every Tuesday night. For D3, I would find this unacceptable, if no offline play is provided.

The requirement of an internet connection is not a big deal for me at all. The "real money AH" kinda breaks the fourth wall for me, and I'm not entirely happy about that, but I understand their reasons for implementing it. The good thing? It can pretty much be completely ignored. To me, one of the coolest, most rewarding aspects of these games is actually seeing that awesome loot drop from monsters I killed myself, so I have no interest whatsoever in buying equipment from other players in a Diablo game.

Other than the above, the new "banner system" seems interesting and pretty cool, though I'm not a fan of the "instantly teleport to your friends" feature they've attached to it. Actually, it seems to me that travel is one of the things they've made altogether too easy in D3 -- in addition to the banner, characters will get a Stone of Recall, which is basically a hearthstone without cooldown that allows them to teleport back to the last town they were in, and a Cauldron of Jordan, which allows them to sell items for vendor prices on the spot, without having to go back to town. Meh.

You are aware the conditions gold farmers are forced to work in? It doesn't bother you that Blizzard are effectively profiteering from this?

I am very well aware of the conditions that they work in. They are far better than conditions for the vast majority of Chinese workers. And no-one is forcing them to 'work' like that, they do so by their own choice.
And I don't see what Blizzard has anything to do with this. They make a game. What people choose to do with this game is up to them.

Not forced you say?
And what have Blizzard got to do with this you ask? Well they have now made it much easier and they are directly going to profit from it.

As the article mentioned, there are perhaps over 100000 gold farmers in China. A tiny minority are being exploited through illegal activity but boo-hoo, there are people in China whose exploitation is far worse than being forced to play computer games.

As the number suggests, as there is already a huge number of gold farmers in China, the 'trade' is already well-established and hey, D3 isn't even out yet. In any case, the effect of having an official 'marketplace' is going to add much more competition to the market thereby driving prices down, which means that gold farming will be far less viable as a business. I don't like the idea of having a 'marketplace' like that, but it's always been around anyway and not including it in the game isn't going to stop the trade.

Lol, it will be interesting to see how much time will pass for a cracked, "off-line only" build of Diablo III to appear on BitTorrent :-P