I hate the always online crap more, with your character stored on the server. Just let me play the single player game the way I want to. It was always fun to download a couple of 'trainers' after finishing the game to mess about.
Need for speed most wanted was average until I got a mod that could instantly speed up your car to 250mph and stop dead again, making it possible to play billiards with other cars, great fun.

Anyway I won't be buying any items, probably won't even bother buying the game.

I won't buy any items that way and I don't care what others will do with their money.

Actually thats a good thing IF dupes are impossible to find certain things in Diablo is like winning the lottery also some ingame items are worth a lot i saw a perfect griffon on Diablo 2 go for 300 Dollar once or tyraels armor or zod runes all so rare i never seen anything rarer then a GUL rune drop in Diablo 2 Lod.
Ok once Diablo walked the earth and i got a mediocre annihilus charm which was the peak aside from a 3+ pala torch which you can obtain with hard work. but an annihilus was the rarest.

And I killed massive Hords of Monsters and farmed like stupid. I needed minutes for a baal run on Hell with my team mates.

A lot of people used bots to farm 24/7 and run more than one game at once and they rarely found a zod or tyrael.
Then while trading people tried to rip you of all the time and on HC mode they tried to lure you out of town to show you a rune and then killed you and hundreds of hours were gone within a second .

An Auction House is a good idea since basically the items you find are worth real money and to make it safer and easier to trade its a good idea.

BTW: There are no Items you need to complete the game you can win with the right party and skills nude atleast until hell after baal nightmare its a whole other story. besides they wont sell items which arent found in the game to not destroy the ingame balance and economy. So its obvious that there wont be items that are needed to complete the game because you cant find good items on normal difficulty. (There might be Items without them it will be next to impossible to kill uber diablo like beasts).

I am looking forward to Diablo without dupes it will increase the value of items ten fold and the auction house makes it easy to sell the stuff. if you are good and a little lucky you can make some money while playing and wont have to go the way via ebay and wait to get your money. The auction platform is a very good thing no matter what angle you look at it. It just simplifies everything and makes it easier for people to play certain char builds which are build around a special item and would be impossible without it. Its good for everyone and bad for noone exept people trying to rip you off. whats easier for someone that found a rare item by chance and has no deeper knowledge about Diablo look it up on the internet ask someone that either has no clue or trys to get it for cheap. Or just put it on auction to see what it sells for.

@seriouswb

no need to be afraid that beginners will buy high level items with 5 bucks no newbie will spend 100-1000 Dollar on an item. The stuff in Diablo is RARE. a random elite unique like templars might drops once every 40000 killed baals on hell dificulty the other 12 monsters that can drop it need to be killed 100000-500000 times to get it once guaranteed. and thats not even a special item and certainly none of the rare things also the stats vary a lot and a perfect item is even rarer. Or look at high runes that drop one in 1.5 Million monster and you need upto 5 of them to build a powerful runeword. One Ber or Zod rune would be easily worth 200+ Dollars without dupes. A guy with an enigma armor would be rare exception and not almost standard. they dont add items that werent found through gamer. its dupes and bots that destroy the game and after a decade of intense learning i hope blizzard foubd a way like promised to make cheating impossible or atleast hard and dangerous enough so it cant affect the game that much again.

An auction house wouldnt take anything from the game experience just make life easier for the player. the dozends of shops around the net sell 20 runes for 50 Dollar thats how the ingame balance is destroyed and thats how legit gamers have taken away their fun because they were lucky to find something which is essentially worthless.

See i am not so worried about this auction thing as much as I am about the always always online connection thing.

The always online thing sucks like always in my case I can live with it because I dont play single Player at all but you are right this really sucks I hate when they do that to games I wanna play offline.

Same, but I do travel abroad a lot so it'd be nice to be able to play single-player. Then again, pirates will probably provide a nice solution to that so it really comes down to the damn HDD space of having 2 installations.

That's just not true sorry.  Regardless of there being an auction house or not, there will be people farming for items; average prices will be undercut and lowered by chinese farmers.  This is even generously assuming they eliminate bots entirely.  Your example of Diablo 2 rune prices is wrong, you could get 40 of any rune for under 30 dollars.  The items will not be incredibly expensive, the fact that this is endorsed and atvertised by Blizzard will make it more profitable for item farmers by vastly increasing their target market. 

Real world currency has no place in the Diablo series.  "Making the life easier for the player" is exactly what ruins my immersion unfortunately.  Items should be earned within the confines of the game, whether that be looting the item yourself, or finding the things someone wants in return for a trade.  Accessibility of items/power being influenced by real currency just ruins multiplayer for me. 

I mean I know that none of the original D1/2 team are working on D3 which sucks, but I didn't expect to get less excited about the game as they release more news.   Especially not to this extent.

The single player mode is what is making people buy it, but there is so much
loyal fans of Diablo just like WoW that the multiplayer will be successful too...

@seriouswb

Sure chinese item farmer will influence the market but they are just people without bots it will still be hard to find good things. And the main problem in Diablo 2 are dupes they make the prices plummet extremly. Even with chinese Itemfarmers Prices will still be a lot higher then Diablo 2 today. The Auctionhouse just kills of the the trade activities around the game. And offers a safe platform to trade. And I dont know how the rune prices are today i dont care tbh. I stopped playing because the massive amount of high class items took the fun away for me. Chinese Itemfarmers are no problem compared to bots maphack and dupes. One Chinese cant farm much more per day then me when I am serious about it. The amounts of rare items will still be massively reduced compared to Diablo 2.

No real money currency in a game is just wishful thinking. Just because you cant see it inside the game doesnt mean it isnt there. And I am sure Blizzard knows how to make an addicting Diablo again. No matter which team works on it. You should atleast try it cant be worse then what happened with Diablo 2. If an Item is earned with legit methodes its legit for me. Prevent cheating and everything is going to be alright.