I'm apologize if some of the things I'm going to say in this post were said already, I haven't had the chance to read every page. I've been a long time lurker on escapist and this whole situation has bothered me enough to break that and share my contribution. In fact, the only contribution I have to this discussion is to say that the glass is half full, and I will be attempting to voice my opinion on this topic with that mentality in mind.
Overall, this is my stance with blizzard/battle.net and this controversey: A company spends years of time making a game thats most certainly going to be a fantastic game. It creates a framework with the intentions of bring people who play all of their games together and help them be more connected. They put more hours into their games than most other companies to make sure they can present a product thats incredibly fun, balanced, and safe for anyone. They listen to community feedback and add balance changes, new features (maybe not every single feature you wanted, but its certainly apparent they listen), and other content to give their games lasting appeal. But somehow despite all of this, the negative side of things, no matter how it pales in comparison to the positives, are brought up and put under a spotlight to be crucified.
From a reasonable standpoint, I want to look at the downsides of this constant internet connection and try to offer plausable explainations for why Blizzard made the decisions they did. The main disadvantage for Diablo 3 requiring a constant internet connection is (obviously) players will no longer be able to create and play characters offline. This is obviously a problem to anyone who doesn't have a stable internet connection. The fortunate side of this argument is that most people nowadays do have a stable internet connection. The unfortunate part, some people don't (particularly those in the army oversees). If I were to leave that point by itself without analyzing it further, its easy to see how someone could get worked up about that. However, there is likely much more to the reasoning behind this other than an ill motive to screw legitimite customers out of playing their game.
First, lets look at Diablo 2 and how it was laid out. When I first played Diablo 2(like I'm sure many others did) I played through the single player portion of the game offline up until I slew the beast Diablo himself. After I did that I though "Hrmm, well maybe I should try the game online now that I have some experience under my belt!" To my dismay, I was not allowed to bring my single player character to my online account. The first point that Blizzard made themselves was that they didn't want that to happen. By saving your characters on a server, this solves that small problem at face value. But wait, thats just stupid, why the hell would that alone be worth forcing customers to mantain a constant internet connection? Well I think theres much more to it than that.
Diablo 2 was FULL of hacks and cheats that allowed a player to dupe items, create fake items, and maphack the unexplored map. It took Blizzard quite a while before they started catching people doing this and banning them for hacks and for duped items. Lets imagine a situation where Blizzard made D3 so that you can play your characters both online and offline. People are much better at creating hacks and cheats than 10 years ago, and without the server to monitor someone, theres nothing prevent them from doing even worse today. And with the new ambitious real money auction hall, it would literally negate the economy. One might argue that the presence of the money auction hall itself might hurt the economy, however as a friend of mine put it, I would much rather have a game's servers be supported by microtransactions than by a subscription fee. The easiest way to solve all of this? Store a player's character on Blizzard's servers. This way Blizzard can make sure that no players can cheat, hack, or scam other players by trading duped items, and the game remains balanced. The side effect is that a player must mantain a connection so that the character data can be saved on the server as the player's character changes. Ok, well you might still disagree with their decision, but it certainly isn't unreasonable.
Now I think it would be unfair to leave it there without mentioning battle.net. I know a lot of people have very strong feelings about battle.net and how its terrible horrible nasty DRM. I will try to leave my own opinions of DRM out of this and lets try to see what Blizzard wanted battle.net to be. Battle.net 2.0 had 3 goals when it was released. First, to make it easy to stay connected with friends throughout all Blizzard games. Second, was to create a matchmaking system for SC2 to simplify the process of players locating and organizing games with their friends. Third was to unify the accounts of all newer Blizzard games to allow a player to customize their profile with achievements, avatars, decals and whatnot. Overall this was a system designed to bring players of Blizzard games more together, which is a good ambition seeing as how Blizzard games have always been heavily driven by their respective communities. At no point in its creation, were there EVER statements released claming that they were glad they could help fight piracy by restricting their customers. I guess the point I'm trying to get at here is that Blizzard as a company created battle.net to benefit the community and not simply to restrict it.
In closing, I do understand that this will affect a small group of people who wont be able to play the game until their living situation changes, which is truly unfortunate and I do not blame you for your frustration. For everyone else though, I plead to try to not take everything at face value, blaming Activision or some other easy scapegoat. If you try to think of the reasoning behind the decisions some companies make, it might appear less evil and greedy than you think. Diablo 3 is going to release and its going to carry the same great quality and polishing of every Blizzard game before it. And you know what, it looks even better when your glass is half full.
