Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[Zarathustra]

Over at Penny Arcade, Tycho made this post about Diablo 3. It seems to jibe with what I've been hearing from everyone playing it.

I keep thinking I’m going to get back into Diablo 3, but it never seems to happen; they inspire new outrage on a weekly basis with everything that surrounds the clicking, but I’m not even running the executable! I’m safe altogether from these fresh horrors. And everyone else beat it and left. If I wanted to get back in, I’d be doing it alone. So that might not happen.

So, as those who have mostly left the bulding already, Diablo 3’s Real Money Auction House is double mysterious and we don’t know what it’s for. Well, okay: we know know. The “moneys.” What I’m saying is that getting new shit actually is the game. For us, anyway. Getting and, crucially, equipping new loot. The whole AH thing short-circuits the entire idea: the game is, functionally speaking, a pinata. Right? Obviously, you could just go buy candy at the store. It’s not about having candy. It’s about getting candy.

If anything, it seems Blizzard is making that piñata hard enough to crack that you're forced to visit the candy store they've set up just next door. I'm of the mind that if the auction house weren't included at all and people had to resort to normal trade channels, the game would be more "fun" for people. Inferno play would be worn like a badge instead of an assumed "oh, he bought those items" situation (be it with gold or real money).

I still plan to pick the game up eventually, but I guess I was hoping for the second coming of D2, which people are still playing a decade later.