Blizzard's Rob Pardo has announced that, similarly to StarCraft II unlike the previous games in the series, Diablo III will require players to always be online while playing the game. If you lose connection, you're back to the title screen. According to Pardo, the reason for it was that all characters are being stored on the Battle.net servers, and this will allow Blizzard to authenticate all characters and their items, preventing cheating. Because of the integration of even the single player mode with Battle.net, the game will also not allow any mods to be installed.
As someone who is sometimes cut off from the Internet and would still like to play the single-player part of the game, this is not a welcome change for me.
Another controversial decision is that Diablo III will include not only an action house selling items for in-game currency, but also one where players will be able to sell their loot for real money. He explained that Blizzard's motivation for introducing it was the fact that if they don't, third party companies will still do it, and it's best for the developer to do it themselves and properly regulate it, which would also make such transactions safer for buyers and sellers.
The action house will function on the account level, not character level - a player will be able to sell the items of any of their characters. The company is not doing out of for pure altruism, though - they will, of course, charge a fee from buyers and sellers. The money will be available to be used in the Blizzard store or taken out in cash. However, the latter option will require an additional fee.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you excited to farm for loot soon? Personally, while I'm not a fan of buying and selling in-game items for money, I also don't care that much, since I'm likely to just play the game in single-player mode or with friends who are also unlikely to buy their weapons for real world currency.
Source: Shacknews
