DiabloFans

Don't like the idea of buying progress in a game. Your financial position should have no bearing in a game at all; it should simply be what you can accomplish yourself by playing the game using whatever time/skill you have.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of people that want instant gratification, and feel they should be entitled to substitute money for actually PLAYING a game (which ironically, all this time I thought was something people would actually want to do...because they are supposed to be fun to play...).

As for the argument it will happen anyway, that is a poor excuse really...you can't stop something you want to prevent, so you legitimise it and make it even easier?

The only benefit of the RMAH is that it will be a source of revenue for the game and maybe help to fund future work/support. Even so, I would prefer it didn't exist.

Quote from maka

Wow, you're a really slow learner. AH's affect drop rates. Now go sit in the corner and think about how that affects people who don't want to use any AH...

Quote from name="Blizzard Post07 June 2012" »

The auction house has absolutely no effect on drop rates. There are conspiracy theories and misunderstandings but I do want to re-iterate, the is NO interaction whatsoever. Bashiok mentioned earlier that we took the AH into account, so let me expand a little bit on that.

The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development we didn't have an Auction House, we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60 internally before the game came out using only drops that I found - we all did.
When we say we "took the AH into account" that means it's one of many factors. ie. some players will choose to play without trading, some players would play in a group of 4 where they share drops among each other, and some (as it turns out, many) players would use the AH.

Three weeks after launch player's gear is much higher than what we were expecting. When I killed the Butcher on Inferno for the first time I was using a weapon with 492 DPS. There are also certain passives which are much more powerful than they were during internal development. One With Everything, for example, was basically never used internally because we didn't have an auction House. With the auction house, it feels like a mandatory passive. In retrospect we should have seen it coming. In the game's current state though, it's a powerful Monk ability that gives Monks a big survivability boost and has some interesting (some would argue fun, others would argue negative) effects on gearing.

I consider playing without the Auction House to be a very fun way to play the game. I'm personally planning on rolling some new characters that I'll set aside to be "no-AH/no-twink" characters. Much like in D2 when I would make a new character with a friend and we'd agree with each other not to twink our characters out.

AH has no effect on drop rates in the game. And if you don't trust a blue post then... well no point in discussing further.