Originally Posted by
Frozen Death Knight
Yet they still did not manage to make it appealing enough for a lot of people to keep playing. Blizzard games have always striven for a wider appeal, but at least with all their other games they succeeded with keeping people interested enough in their games for a long time. Diablo 3 may have sold the most of all their games, but in the end, it has lost more players than any of their games in such a short time span, despite the game being less than a year old. The Diablo 3 team failed at what their other games always shined the most, which was the longevity of the gameplay. That has never happened before and it is frankly disturbing.
While I do not really disagree with you that Jay may have got instructions from higher up when designing the game, the problem that they did not know how to implement something like the AH and still make sure that the gameplay around the itemization (the most vital part of any Diablo game) worked, it is a sign of incompetence, to be very blunt. Personally, I do not believe that the AH is all to be blamed, when good item design could have solved the main issues surrounding the system. Instead, they made a very WoW styled itemization based on very random drops along with adding a non-random system like the AH. Lack of insight and experience made this a total mess, in the end, and I stand by it.