@HAMMERCLAW And, for you, there will be Torchlight 2. I think if anything a big part of the reason Blizz took out a single player component is to avoid completely destroying a game with whose development staff they appear to have a very cordial and respectful relationship. Not surprising since there are some Diablo team members that bridge the gap.

@gothicman have you even played the game? good lord.

@gofkyourself123 Point number four in your post is not only something I had never considered in terms of justifying the RMAH (I was in favor of it anyway), but also something that goes a long way towards improving my view of it. There may be outliers that create problems, but it's not as if those don't exist in games like WoW as well. The game economy adapts and accomodates both types of players in its own way, and I'm sure Blizzard designers are intelligent enough to balance the game so there isn't a huge advantage to be gained by dumping massive tons of cash in, but enough incentive to prompt some affluent individuals to do so if desired. Also I would guess they want people to have to spend SOME real money to achieve the intended balance without extended sessions of farming. This is a shame in a sense, but it is less intrusive than a pay-to-play system and also something that people seeking greater challenge can completely ignore.

@Shanks_D_Chop And, yours has none but "being polite and erudite and clear in making your point". And mine none but carrying this thing on way too long. But, that's the internet for you.

@WolfGrey @picho86 Some of us just joined decent guilds and ignored this 'community' of which you speak.

@ArxUnKanesh Too unstable is subjective. My friends and i did it with Diablo 1 on 14.4kbps modems. Of course, there was no hardcore one-death-only mode to worry about, hehe.

@picho86 in diablo I and II single player characters were separate from online ones. that way you could play offline if you wanted to, but it opened the game to hacking. online characters were kept on a central server so this could not be done, at least in the case of diablo 2. diablo 1 still used battle.net to verify that a character was not breaking rules, not sure if they kept the character files on their server or not. if the game doesn't require you to be online, so reasons blizzard, then there's no way to stop people from cheating. their characters can never be verifiably legitimate, so they can never be taken online. diablo 3 eliminates the issue entirely and you can only make online characters. a lot of folks in d1 and d2, myself included, only played online characters to begin with for this same reason - it sucks to put so much time into something and have to start all over if you want to play with friends. But, from this perspective, Diablo 3 is no different from the others, they simply removed the vestigial and IMHO useless single-player-only component.

This is what happens when your 'beta testing' phase is nothing more than a prolonged and highly elitist advertising campaign.

Minimal production values? You're comparing this to what exactly? It is true that the graphics are of a level comparable to something like Torchlight technically speaking, but this is a design decision, not a consequence of an under-funded project. I recommend you take a look at how software is actually designed, maybe take a class or two, and then try to imagine the labor required to build games like Blizzard does.

@Aeondeity Once you can define what 'balanced' even means, you're halfway to realizing how your dream will never be realized, for anyone, ever.