Thrawn
Emperor
The game play could actually be decent but they've piled all this other crap onto it. After all, would you eat a five course meal if they sprinkled sewer water all over it?
Sewer water to one person could be perfectly clean water to another.
I can kind of see the points about no mods and not choosing skill points etc, although in this day and age requiring you to have an internet connection doesn't really seem like a valid complaint tbh. Sure if your internet goes down, or the servers go down you can't play, but you can't play if your power goes out either. Or your computer breaks. Given my experience with battle.net 2.0 through WoW and SC2 I have a feeling it'll be fine, might be a few hiccups in the first few days when the servers are likely getting slammed, but it won't be anything like what happened with AC2.
As for the real money ah, others have said it in probably better words than me on other forums, so I'll just quote them.
Spoiler :
I'm 50/50 but there's a lot of misinformation going around here. so I'll try to address it. I am worried but I don't think it'll necessarily impact my ability to enjoy the game, and if i end up making a few $$ from it so be it, if not, okay, whatever, I do see potential for abuse, and seeing it "ruining" the game, but I don't want to cry the sky is falling just yet. It can be implemented in a way to not completely ruin everything.
1) d2 had no real ingame currency anyways, first it was SoJ's then they were unstable, and it became just a literal fudgfest of people trying to figure out what currency was for what since in game gold was worthless, d2jsp ended up creating it's own virtual currency which worked, but nothing in game, was self contained economy, it was horrid, so I dunno if there was a "better" solution for this but I don't inherently think having no "real in game currency" automatically destroys the game.
2) It shouldn't change priorities, very few items, namely quest ones, will be soulbound. That means if you find a cool item and you want to use, it use it, then when you don't need it anymore, put it up on the auction house. There is no "just like new!" unless you socket it, or alter it with their various methods, it's no different from equipping it and using it, than from picking it up, and selling it. So I fail to see how this affects your priorities at all. Misinformation perhaps?
3) It doesn't lessen anything, if you want to get an item by farming it cool, if you can farm other items you don't need, to make some $$ that you throw back into the shop to buy the item you DO need, how is this a bad thing necessarily? Sure someone who comes in and buys all the best gear with money will obviously kind of rub you the wrong way, but he'll not have enjoyed the game the same way you did, and also he has to reach level requirements to use a lot of it anyways, so he can have fun not knowing how to play his class/etc while he tries to level his ass through to get to the appropriate level for X/Y/Z gear that he forked up $$$ for.
4) While slightly concerned, Diablo wouldn't work with a pay to play model like wow, so there has to be a way to maintain the servers and security licenses that they'll inevitably have to instill to ensure fair gameplay, this isn't necessarily cheap, and dealing with customer service, and coming out with potential patches/content/fixes costs time and money too. So having some means to generate revenue in a continued basis is required to maintain the game at a high level. Also, often from a business standpoint, you never "just have enough", activision is probably throwing up a 10% increase in revenue as a challenge/goal for blizzard this year, and you can't rely on just game sales alone anymore to meet these goals, so they have to find other alternatives to generate steady revenue.
5) I agree, it's scary to think about farming companies/etc, but we haven't heard anything about policies or rules about this, maybe there will be a limit to how many auctions you can create in a set time, botting will still be illegal, and if they make the game difficult/fun enough, it may not be profittable to do farming as a job, and therefore, not worth it for gold farmers. I don't like the thought of using real money for in game gold since that obviously is not a thing blizzard allowed in WoW, but this was because people were making Money OFF of blizzard property, something that you agree to in the ToA when you log in, this just makes it so if you want to do it, you do it through legal venues and not through shady 3rd party systems, that often lead to hacks or losses of accounts that BLIZZARD has to resolve and fix often times. Like I said I'm skeptical but it's not inherently game over.
6) It is a slippery slope, but in order for companies and corporations to survive, they need to evolve with the ever changing market. Look at the music industry, those that clung onto cd sales to survive have gone bankrupt, those who embraced the internet movement and focus more on live event coverage, have not only survived, but have shown quarterly GROWTH despite all of the fearmongering about the music industry "dying" displayed in the media. I don't blame blizzard for advancing itself, will we see this with WoW? probably not because they already have a cash shop for vanity stuff, as well as monthly subscription to keep it's costs paid for, while still generating revenue to stakeholders. While it sucks right now and to claim it's a slippery slope, how awesome would it be, if blizzard released one of their high quality games, for free and was able to do this simply because of a cash shop, something that you don't have to utilize and still enjoy the game at your own pace. If you could get something like d3 or sc2, for FREE, and all you had to do is live with the fact that some people will spend $$$ in the game, is that inherently so bad?
Don't get me wrong, i'm not condoning this 100%, i'm just saying there is potential for it to not be as bad as everyone thinks. My greater concerns is how this works for ladder races (assuming we even have ladder). I was concerned about PvP, but at least blizzcon they said, gear in general would interact differently for PvP Arena/battlegrounds than from a PvE standpoint, so it's probably not going to be a scenario where guys can powerlevel (assuming you can even do this?!, remember this isn't d2 necessarily) to 99, buy all the best gear, walk into arenas and just pwn face against seasoned veterans. But it DOES mean someone who doesn't want to do the gear grind, CAN do this, and just focus on arenas cuz that's his thing.
I don't see why it's a big deal. Oh noes, someone can buy an item with money. Who cares? It's not like blizzard is designing diablo 3 to be fair and balanced anyway (they are literally on record saying as such), so what does it really matter? If you care about ladders or their pvp, you are more likely going to be concerned about class imbalances then items which may or may not be an upgrade over what you can get in game anyway.
Not to mention you can just use the normal gold-driven auction house if you really really hate it. It's a feature, use it or not at your own discretion.
Honestly, this is how I see things going. Starting out, everyone is going to throw their crap on the real money AH. Once they realize that only a small group would actually *buy* items for money, people will start putting items on the gold-driven AH, then try to sell the gold on the real money AH.
As far as I understand, the real money ah is not available in hardcore, which is likely where serious pvpers will play anyway.
You could also look at trying Path of Exile, which I'm shamelessly mentioning because it's developed here in NZ and Grinding Gear Games will likely be a potential future employer for me.