Diablo 3's 2012 launch ended up being a disaster because of its always-online requirements with broken servers and a real-money auction house which nobody wanted or liked. Ten years after, we can confirm that eventually Blizzard was able to get things back on track by launching Diablo 3 and ended up having a superb ARPG. What is the reason it took over two years Blizzard to get rid of that unpleasant real-money auction house Diablo IV Gold? It seems you could blame the boxes that the game was shipped into and their printed promises of a functioning auction house.
As reported from PC Gamer, some former Blizzard and Blizzard North employees held a panel at last weekend's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. In the panel, the group of former Blizz developers discussed the background of Diablo and their own personal connections to the games, and shared stories about making the popular series. In the forum, the leading designer for Diablo 3, Jay Wilson discussed the controversial auction house, providing an explanation of its beginnings and more.
"When I was at Blizzard," said Wilson, "the reason for doing the auction house in real money was security. It wasn't money. We didn't anticipate making any money off it. The most difficult thing with Diablo 2 was item duping and duping hacks as well as all the gold sellers, and all those things."
According to Wilson stated, Blizzard's strategy to solve this issue for Diablo 3 was to take control of the trading market. This was, according to Wilson, why the game made the decision to require an all-time-online internet connection. Wilson states that when you allow offline clients hackers "got the game." Always online and the auction house were Blizzard's bad attempts at controlling problems from Diablo 2.
However, shortly after its launch in 2012 the auction house of Diablo 3 was deemed to be one of the games biggest flaws, constantly slammed and mocked by the player community buy Diablo 4 Gold. Yet removing it wasn't easy in the least, not due to technical headaches. Instead, its delayed 2014 removal was because auction houses were a promised feature of the game. It was printed on each it's retail box and there were some legal concerns over cutting the feature.