Blizzard vs. Real Money Trading (RMT)

[Concillian]

i totally agree with you both, they shouldnt have it, since we all know that gold buyers and sellers will try to exploit this some how and make it easier for them to make profit in d3, i just keep thinking how its going to happen with bots doing the same ting they do now in d2.

Well, I'm sure online only has a lot to do with the $AH. It eliminates an entire avenue of bot exploitation by allowing them to keep certain portions of the game code OFF local computers and locked away where nobody can touch it, which will make it difficult to exploit with bots.

While you still can, the security will be more like WoW, where the main avenue of gold seller gold is by taking over user accounts.

However, the WoW AH is pretty locked down. User accounts are stripped down and vendored and banks pillaged, but Blizzard has made it very difficult for them to use the AH as a source of gold without actually playing the game. They are stuck with vendor prices and pillaging guild banks and such.

WoW has been their testing ground for this. The third party WoW gold sellers certainly have not been leaving tactics in their back pocket and they are not able to use the AH like they used to be able to. The addition of the Paypal tie in (which requires a tie to a real financial institution account of some form or another) adds yet another layer of security.

I'm sure we'll see some cases, but I think they'll be few and far between. They have a decent handle on how to keep them from using the WoW AH for profit. So accounts can still be compromised the way they gain access to WoW accounts now. However, if they can't use the $AH, what are they going to do with your D3 account? Vendor stuff for gold? I'm sure there will be a market for outside sources of gold, but with the $AH in place, that market should be really small.

I think that's the main advantage of the $AH. It demonstrates their confidence that they can maintain a significantly lower percentage of cheat issues than the first two games, which had rather massive issues.

As far as immersion and suspension of disbelief, it might make that even easier, as you won't be likely to end up in a group with a cheating smacktard when you decide to try out a public game. This was certainly the case in Diablo II, I didn't play Diablo online, but I get the impression it was the case in Diablo as well. I was always more concerned with the people I was playing with due to questions of whether they were using hacks. If this ends up significantly less likely, then I will be able to let myself be more immersed.

As Frag said, the $AH will exist, but most of the people posting here will give great items to people they know, just like we did in Diablo II instead of putting them on eBay or whatever.