[citation][nom]wildkitten[/nom]This doesn't even talk about the glut of DLC's which have cause developers to deliver half done games and then flesh out the games with DLC the customer has to pay for which increases the cost of the games dramatically.This whole argument about piracy is also dubious. For the record, I have never downloaded and played a game that was pirated. I value my computer too much to take the risk and to be perfectly honest, I don't want to play a game I don't pay for. That disclaimer aside, I have yet to see hard evidence that piracy does indeed affect sales that much. For one thing, they have to prove that someone who downloads a pirated copy would have bought it to begin with and there is no possible way to prove that. If someone plays a pirated Diablo 2 but they wouldn't have bought it anyway, Blizzard is out no money. I'm not saying it's right that the person pirated it, I'm just pointing out the fallacy of the argument.I've also seen articles where they have supposedly surveyed those who do download pirated game and many of them say they use it as demos to know whether or not to buy it. I have no idea if that's true or not, there is no way to prove that either, but there is some logic to it. Many games don't have a demo, or a demo good enough to make a judgement about a game, so I can see the rationale.I also do not believe for one moment that D3's online DRM is to prevent piracy. I believe the RMAH is the sole reason it's there. Initally we were told that they didn't want people duping or hacking items locally then placing them on the RMAH. But when they recently announced that there will be global play, but that items dropped not in your home region would not be able to go on the RMAH. Well, if they can prevent that, it would be very simple to code items in a local client to have certain tags that would make it impossible to place on the RMAH. If you can't access the server controlled items, there would be no way to know what tags would be needed to properly hack a locally dropped item.But someone who were to play D3 offline is a lot less likely to use the RMAH which means Activision Blizzard is out the transaction fee of these potential non sales so to speak. But if everyone has to play online where the server controls the drop rate which can be adjusted at any time by Blizzard, then the single player has to compete with the botters and farmers for the server controlled drops making it more likely a person will be tempted to use the RMAH to get an item they need.Honestly, the developers are doing more damage to gaming than pirates ever could.[/citation]
I very much agree with you, sir.
) It seems that everyone just wants to flame this game whether they've played it or not. Lots of game have rough starts. I'll probably never enter the RMAH but the gold driven one is a real nice addition. The game is awesome, a really well done progression from D2 and no matter how much you bitch, it's not going anywhere for a long, long time 
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