Hercanic wrote:Blizzard is
removing the Diablo 3 auction house. Both Gold and Real Money.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978
March 18, 2014 is the shutdown date. I had to double-check the date of this article to make sure it wasn't from April 1st. It's real, it's happening, and I'm not sure if 11 on the 0-10 Surprise Scale is a valid input...
I was also very, very surprised of that move especially with the money-grubbing impression. However, I think it could be explained in quite a few ways nonetheless :
1) Maybe Blizzard already drained all the possible real cash they could get via the AH as there are way too few players left to truly matter. Thus trying to continue this into the expansion is pointless even purely cash-wise considering low expansion sales in that scenario.
2) Along with #1, maybe they felt doing a "reboot" with Loot 2.0 would give them at least enough PR credibility that would translate into enough raw expansion sales.
3) In a worse case scenario, it could be a way to deceive players into buying the expansions then quickly "change their mind" shortly after day 1 and keep both auction houses. Although, I don't think Blizzard would step that low.
Anyway, personally I don't intend to buy the expansion as I didn't get too much into D3 even if we exclude the Auction House. The uninterested story, relatively static areas and so on of Act 1-3 obviously won't be changed that much with an expansion.
Although Loot 2.0 could honestly be a huge gamechanger, the problem is it relies that it truly works. Hopefully, it isn't Loot 1.1 or some overglorified change that doesn't change much in reality.