The online always argument is folly, ever patched a game that was working to then have it crash? Patches are no reason for this, they worked fine being optional for single player users and would continue to work fine.

The auction stuff some are backing up and rationalizing is really to early to make a call on, it very well could ruin the game completely and put a bad stain on blizzard, only after release will this be known, if to many players feel they have to spend more real cash to play the game at the same level as others doing the same it will certainly ruin it for many.

All that said almost no games anymore have decent co-op models that can played on a lan, which is what I was hoping for in D3.

The always online thing ruined it for me, StarCraft 2 is so slow booting and connecting even with cable connection for me that it just collects dust, so D3 which was highly anticipated is a no longer a product our home will be purchasing which only costs blizzard 3 sales, insignificant, however I do have to wonder how many sales like this blizzard will lose with these decisions as opposed to how many new sales they will get because of them, to me, it seems they will actually lose profits in the long run.

In the end I am not one of these people who will sit on a high horse claiming that if I had an opportunity to make more money from my work I would not, so I will not call blizzard greedy like so many others garnering images of a fat white man with a cigar behind a desk somewhere, it is their product, and DUH profit is what they are creating it for, however in this case I just am chosing not to purchase it.

Personally, I prefer “online only” over “online or offline”. It makes life A LOT easier for everyone, especially the developers.

In a game that has a multiplayer economy (auction house), any progress made while not connected to the service is immediately invalidated anyway, due to the fact, as you said, that it is unverifiable. So you would need to play the game in online mode anyway to gain items and resources that would be eligible for trade.

The amount of work that would have to be put into making the offline mode compatible with the online mode is just not worth it.

Either way, I don’t intend to purchase items on the Auction House with anything other than farmed gold (a few feet for a nice hat), though I plan on taking advantage of anyone that does buy stuff.

The last one however I still cannot get behind, not all of us have good permanent net connections, and some of game while we are on holiday, traveling, etc. The fact I cannot play a game when I want is a problem and frankly most every other game that has had a “you must be online all the time to play this” has eventually had to remove it.

I should be getting a new PC in a few weeks so then I’ll be able to play games with full settings, I can’t wait.