Playing offline, which you could do in the first two games, wasn’t an option. So players were forced to make no progress at all while Blizzard dealt with the server issues D2R Items. The issue didn’t come completely by accident: Prior to its release, and basing off the playable test players were already complaining over the requirement for being always online.
“Right now with the state it’s being in, it’s a broken product,” said John Walker for RPS. “A single-player game that won’t pause, and if you leave it running will boot you out and then stop all progress. ”
But Blizzard kept its course and the launch disaster was the end result. The frustration was further aggravated by the requirement for always-online seemed to be linked to another online feature, and one that proved the most critical to the game’s problems in its early years.
Blizzard had a problem. In the previous Diablo series, games’ capability to trade items had led to an underground market for loot. The players who were looking for the top equipment were willing to pay, and this left the doors open to unscrupulous third-party companies and price-slashing. Blizzard realized the dangers of an unofficial, unregulated marketplace for Diablo products, and believed it could make it more secure by having a legitimate, well-regulated one.
“The auction house was born of the desire to recognize third party trading in order to keep players within the game to perform their business instead of going to third-party websites, and , as a result, lessen fraud or scams, spamming and also the profits from hacking into the game D2R ladder items buy, creating duplicates, etc. ,” former game director Jay Wilson said in an interview with DiabloII. net after leaving the company.
