Diablo III: Always-Online DRM (must be online to play)

[Dark Jaguar]

And for more Diablo III news, there is an auction house in the game where players can sell things for real money. Yeah.

Let's be fair. The auction house for real money exists separately and along side another auction house using the in-game currency. Further, they aren't selling gold or items directly, the pricing of items will be entirely determined by the in-game economy. Supposedly Blizz will scoop a little off the top like most auction houses. Fair enough. Blizz has yet to reveal how this money gets back into the seller's bank account. It might involve Paypal I suppose.

That's all well and good, but even this version has one big issue. Fact is, who is going to sell something on the fake money auction house when they can sell it on the real money auction house? Sure, there's going to be some overflow, but for the most part just about anything with any real demand is going to end up for sale for actual cash, including the fake money. As a result, the in-game economy is going to unfairly favor real life rich people over poor. People play games to ESCAPE that reality (that particular part more than any other). Maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe the fake money economy will be perfectly fine, but my experience says otherwise.

The new argument about the DRM is this is about stopping cheating online. That's a noble cause. Too bad that has nothing to do with offline play. Here's the solution. Make offline characters unable to be uploaded and used on the server. That's how some games already do it. While a little frustrating, that would be a completely defensible move that would maintain the same level of security that this heavy handed method claims to be about. If I can just use an offline character roster for LAN and solo play, problem pretty much solved.