That's the whole point, to get the singleplayer folks buy items. There isn't another WoW so they are trying out different sale models, how to keep that revenue coming without a subscription. In today's market it's almost like cosmetic DLC.

Same thing is planned for Starcraft 2 with the inclusion of Arcade, where you pay for premium maps and mods.

IMO If anything that would make them even much bigger assholes than if the removal of the offline capability was solely for DRM purposes. Similar tricks than free to play except without the free to play part.

Where did you read that? I don't recall reading anything about paying for content and I seriously doubt it.

As for people complaining about the lack of a skill tree with points which would lead to a lower number of builds, for a wizard you get C(25,6) ways to pick skills, C(15,3) ways to pick passives, 5^6 ways to pick runes which gives 1.26 trillion possible builds. Well, a bit less since not every skill can be in every skill slot, even in elective, but still.

http://www.vg247.com/2011/10/24/blizzard-arcade-to-replace-marketplace-monetise-mods/

Same thing like AH, sucker them in with promise of earning money and then take a cut out of everything sold.
This will probably make someone very rich, just imagine the next DOTA inventor or better yet imagine how much more money would Blizz make if every DOTA for Warcraft was actually sold.

The only thing good about the drm need to be online is that your character doesnt get erased when you take a break from the game like diablo 2 where you will lose your character forever.

Latest news: Edit: Almost forgot how much i loved 'Fullscreen Windowed'. They really should make that standard for games.

I admitt I don't wany to buy Diablo III, not now at least. I would just like to see "how it plays" because I never really played any Diablo game, but to create an account just to play for 2 days is just pointless. :)

Yep, it does, but its a lie, lol. If you want to get it, you have to be fast though, the download speeds were terrible for me, since everyone is trying to get it. But its very far from being 15GB, maybe the final version will be that big.

I dont really believe their "true intent" was to make a new DRM. I think they really wanted the game to be as focused as possible on multiplayer, and to make the transition between MP and SP easier. And in fact, they did achieve it. As a Diablo veteran, i have to say that it was a pain the ass not being able to use my char from SP on MP mode. I loved the idea of not having to make separate chars for MP and SP. And in order to do that, the only way was to make the always-online requirement. Thats the only way they could keep control of the game and avoid cheating and hacking.

The problem back then was that there were a lot of cheaters who had weapons that did a miljon damage, it destroyed the fun for me in diablo 1 and i was glad that diablo 2 resolved it a bit to my knowledge.

I'd be more concerned if Diablo was online only. But, I don't believe that they're still selling the original game, or at least not a part of the bundle, so I suspect that at some point they'll decide to discontinue providing the servers.

But, OTOH, they might not, compared with the ridiculous amount of money they're making on new games and the damage that shutting the servers down would cause, they might just leave them up until the company goes bankrupt.
The official explanation is basically that they don't think players are smart enough to know whether or not they want to play multiplayer and that they don't want people to start over with multiplayer if they started singleplayer. The comment was crass and condescending and came off as being a post hoc rationalization for the decision rather than the reason.

I think they figured out that WoW had extremely low piracy rates due to the model and wanted to do the same to Diablo. Or they figured out they could make a crapload of money from people playing online, but not so much from people that were just playing a singleplayer only game offline.

Finally got to play and I really want to buy now. I like the colors, graphics and atmosphere with the Glissando diablo music playing in the background. Checkpoints are annoying compared to quick saving but I can live with it. So far its been very easy maybe I will turn up the difficulty if its possible.

You're looking at D2 through some rose-tinted glasses there, as it also had its fair share of problems with both duped items, as well as glitched/hacked items with stats far beyond anything normally available in game. What Blizzard ended up doing is basically resetting the servers (wiping the slate clean) periodically. Thus the two multiplayer options (open and closed bnet) ended up turning into three options- open bnet (characters hosted locally, pretty much anything goes in terms of cheating), closed bnet (characters stored on Blizzard's servers, but this is where all characters would end up getting dumped after all servers resets, and it ended up mostly infested with duped and cheated items), and closed bnet ladder characters (mostly free of cheated items, but only because they got dumped into non-ladder closed bnet periodically). On top of that, many of the exploits used to dupe or created cheated items involved glitching/overloading the servers, so even if you played on closed bnet mostly solo whenever a new exploit was discovered you'd have to put up the latency of 300+ ms until Blizzard got around to fixing the situation. Now with D3 you've got real money transactions provided an added incentive to try to dupe or create cheated items. I'm not terribly optimistic about how that situation will end up looking.

I got to play last night can't seem to play at all today.

I found more things I didn't like then I did like.

http://siecje.blogspot.ca/2012/04/diablo-iii-beta-first-impression.html

Logged in right away just now, looks like they upped the cap somewhat. If you wanna play this would seem to be a good moment to start ;)