Diablo 3 Beta News - August 1st

So does tht mena you're jammers uncle?

Diablo 3 announcements have been pretty crazy.

Real money integrated into the auction house system? Damn.
Online play only? figures.
$50 price tag? Nice. No mention still of a monthly subscription fee? Double nice.

I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea of people buying and selling items on the auction house for real money. I guess people will probably buy and sell items for real money regardless, and this way Blizzard can get a cut of the money (and hopefully not have to charge a monthly subscription fee.) However, if PVP is going to be at all involved in the game, it seems like it would favor people who are willing to spend large amounts of money on virtual items, which is kinda lame. Again, it will happen either way most likely, but this is more like Blizzard is not only condoning it but cashing in on it.

It has the potential to reduce the impact of RMT farming houses, though. The legal outlet for RMT in the game reduces the demand for the illegal ones (because why risk getting banned when you can get what you want without that risk?). This happens in EVE with the PLEX system where people buy with ISK other peoples' game time purchased with real money. Then, if the RMT farmers try to use the legal market, and Blizzard cares, they can easily trace back transactions and figure out that x account is an RMT farmer from China.

That's perfectly valid, but doesn't address the issue of people being able to spend stupid amounts of real world money to make their characters incredibly powerful and imbalance PVP. It cheapens the game, almost. Competition should be based on skill, time put into the character, and luck to a degree. It shouldn't be based on who has spent the most real world money to twink out their character. But, as I mentioned above, it would likely be happening anyway. This is probably the lesser of two evils.

Well, if you compare it to Blizzard generating items out of thin air for real money, it's perfectly benign. They can only buy what others find, which is nothing your couldn't find yourself, if you spent enough time.

Sure.