You vastly underestimate Chinese farmers.  It's not the efficiency you worry about, more the sheer amount that is the concern.  Also yes one will outdo you if you are serious (unless you're unemployed) as they get employed for this when the demand is there and their hours are ridiculous. 

There is a difference between combatting botting, and what they are doing.  Nothing about the auction house discourages botting, the amount of potential customers for these guys is being increased by a monumental amount.  Purchasing items or power with money annoys me almost as much as bots, in that it is going outside the confines of the game to succeed.  It's just a watering down of the genre to me.

Diablo 3 will be a good game, whether it will be a good Diablo game to me remains to be seen.  So far it's looking unlikely but I'm keeping an open mind.

if it is like vlad is saying it seems more to me like they are cutting ebay out of the question and just making it all in house (and thus safer for gamers). I seem to remember people selling diablo items on ebay back in the day. If it is you buy item from blizzard directly than that is a joke and blizzard has really fallen as a game developer.

The one catch is that it seems liek it is anonimized and if it is how do we know blizzard isn't out there selling stuff themseles, or someone at blizzard? If I was in blizzard I would totally make a living out of that stuff.

that is true...they are cutting out the middle man...and keeping
most of the money

@vlad123

Sure Blizzard could do that but they wont sell items there themselfs as that would destroy the balance of the game and lead to loss of customers.

@seriouswb

Sure the auctionhouse doesnt do anything against botting but it also doesnt make the game worse.

Battlenet 2.0/Warden is supposed to do that.

To chinese farmers they are damn good but they use pick it/ maphack and shit like that and without it how fast can you be ? take a sorc or vigor hammerdin and you reach a maximum average speed that cant be broken without cheating. In my prime I played 18 hours day I am studying and cant do this outside of holidays ofcourse also since you achieve everything pretty quick you do this no longer then 2 weeks ->48 hours (without sleep) after ladder start I usually killed baal on hell with selffound crap gear 4 days later torch runs still with sellfound items or traded within the party: After that you just can farm for Items or try out rare characterbuilds but the motivation is gone pretty fast because the items are worthless real quick. I really want to believe it will change with Diablo 3

Pretty good changes.
The hacking and duping was so bad in D2 that you could buy the most powerful runes for a few bucks, at least if they can prevent duping this way the game will be much better. As it was it made end game farming useless when everyone was walking about with the best runes words...( besides I would much rather have Blizzard makes money out of sales than a random duping site...)

Can't say I worry about always connected, I am always connected........( I live in this century unlike some..)

I would love for you to explain to me how single-player in D2 affected clsoed B.net. I expect it to be entertaining as the time you tried to push 98 ping as not being any better than 3.

I played all my single player on closed battlenet for D2.

Better loot drops ( runes, runes words) and the possibility to trade loot with others players made it a much better single player experience than the offline one...The issue was that when you traded with someone else you never knew if the item was real or a dupe that could disappear randomly from your inventory during a blizzard sweep for dupes... Not even mentionning others battlenet specific things like Uber diablo or ladder ranking...

That and it was very easy to trade gear between my chars without having to download any mod...

As for always connected, well, my phone is always connected, my TV is always connected, my books are always connected ( Kindle) so it would be a bit dishonnest for me to claim that my PC isn't or can't be........

That is not single-player though, that's closed B.net. What you are doing is playing multiplayer, except that you are just allowing only 1 person in your game. Singleplayer is that button you click on above the Multiplayer one, and there is nothing you can do to get that character on closed Bnet. You can use him on Open if you wanted to, but not Closed. I want you to explain to me exactly how this new system of being always online will help with cheating in multiplayer when you can't even get on Closed Bnet with those single-player characters?

the mode I was playing was far superior in term of functionailities  to your single player so why should I exactly care about something with less functionalities ?

All I'm saying is what Blizzard is doing with singleplayer already existed in D2 and it worked great so arguing about battlenet latency isn't going to get you anywhere.....

And the reason they are doing it is simple, people learned how to dupe in singleplayer analyzing how the code worked, removing that is going to make it harder.

And like most companies, Blizzard is tired of people playing their games without paying, that's why the always on......

And you will have a tough time arguing that Blizzard does not have the experience to manage 10 millions+ always on players. they do that on a daily basis and those people scream murder if there is any issue with the servers or the connections.....

PS : Once this is implemented it should be fairly easy for Blizzard to offer free trial of D3 the way they do for Wow by the way.....