Blizzard's way to prevent this issue from happening with Diablo 3

As reported in PC Gamer, some former Blizzard and D2R Items Blizzard North employees hosted an event at last weekend's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. During that panel, the group of ex- Blizz devs talked about the background of Diablo and their own connections to the games. They also shared tales of the creation of the popular franchise. In the course of the discussion, former lead designer of Diablo 3, Jay Wilson was interviewed about the controversial auction house, providing an explanation of its beginnings and much more.

"When I was at Blizzard," said Wilson, "the reason for doing the auction house using real money was to ensure security. The reason was not money. We didn't imagine that we'd earn this much money out of it. The most difficult thing in Diablo 2 was item duping and duping hacks along with all that gold selling, as well as all the other things."

According to Wilson explained, Blizzard's way to prevent this issue from happening with Diablo 3 was to take the control of the trading market. This is also why the game made the decision to require an all-time-online internet connection. Wilson affirms that the moment you allow offline clients, the hackers "got you." Thus, being always on the internet and the auction house was Blizzard's attempt to manage the issues from Diablo 2.

However, shortly after its release in 2012 the auction house in Diablo 3 was identified as one of the game's biggest flaws, getting a constant mocking and criticism by the community. However, removing it wasn't an easy task and wasn't due to technical problems. Instead, the reason it was delayed until removal in 2014 was due to the auction house a scheduled feature of V the game , which was printed on all its retail boxes, and there were some legal issues with cutting it off.