Yeah Blizzard, I think I'll pass on this game. Seriously, all the info that's come out in the past couple of days has been discouraging rather than encouraging. I've already spent enough time venting about the shitty idea of a real money auction house, and the idea of not being able to play offline is pretty irritating. But what trumps both of these is this kind of feigned ignorance of the idea that there would be a backlash to it.
Seriously Blizzard, it is not good enough to claim "this is the way the world is going, deal with it" as a reason why we should all just roll over and accept it. As someone else in this thread brought up, internet is not free, and if you live in Australia like me then you get to deal with retarded download caps - and there's no information about exactly how much data is going to be transferred through this system. This means that potentially I could have to budget my time allowed to play the game. It happens. My brother played WoW so much for a couple of months that we came crossed our limit twice. Now why should I have to do that for a game that has always previously had offline singleplayer? Oh, and there's no LAN. I've played Diablo 2 LANs with so many people over the years... it's something you do when you want the relaxed atmosphere of direct communication. Playing it together over the internet doesn't provide the same experience, at all.
But the worst part of this, the absolute clincher, is the utter apathy they have towards even convincing us WHY this is necessary. This isn't like Starcraft II, where they at least had the decency to claim that it was supposed to make the game more social, and was also an anti-piracy measure. And heck, they at least offered a way of playing it offline with all the social and achievement stuff cut out. But there's none of that here: they're actively denying it has to do with piracy, they're not touting any kind of social benefit to being always online, and they're spouting some weak idea that they don't want people to feel like they have to start over again when they go from offline to online play. They don't sell it at all, and then they have the gall to act 'surprised' when people are hostile to the idea.
Blizzard just doesn't care anymore. They know that the game will sell regardless of what they do to it. I'm not going to be so egotistical as to pretend that my not buying it will change their attitude: I'm simply not going to buy it because I'm no longer interested if I can't play offline whenever I like. You know what? Say what you will about Steam: I'm able to boot it up any time I like in offline mode and play Torchlight. I'll just get the sequel to that instead.
