It is going to be much different.  I can't fathom that some of you can't see a difference between third party sites selling items, being a shunned practice, and Blizzard endorsing and legitimising this to the mass market.  I find it messed up that gamers today seem fine with the idea of purchasing power; yes you're condoning this bullshit concept.

Originally I had planned to purchase it on day 1 but their decision to require me to be online all the time + real money being involved = me not purchasing at all now.

it might have been shunned but in practice every weapon with a half decent rune word you traded for after patch 1.10 was a dupe coming from some third party site., so in reality it was rampant. Heck pretty much every D2 class guide you find these days tells people to get gear they can not get legitimately by themselves in the game...

Seriously, how many of the people bitching here have played D2 on battlenet in the last 5 years ???? Before complaining, go see the reality..

Uhh... Do you mean can? Because.. there *is* a difference between the sh*tfest of third-party items sites spamming every channel/every game and a service provided by Blizzard that allows people to trade/buy their items legally.

Even if duping/botting/haxxing is possible in D3, this still seems like a better alternative than having your chat window constantly filled with green whisper texts from spam bots. Maybe you should look in a mirror and ask yourself: "Have I actually played Diablo 2?"

I play D2 regularly thank you very much.  I find it funny that your only argument to this is botting.  If D3 hasn't overcome botting it will be exactly the same, nothing about this has anything to do with botting.  The difference as I keep trying to bash over your heads is that a myriad of people will be more inclined to purchase things.  The average, casual player will not go to a third party site to buy items.

@Vertigo-X: You're exactly the same, please pay attention.  If botting is still in D3, you will get exactly the same whispers.  Please do explain what at all the auction house alone does to combat botting.  Heck third party sites wouldn't need to close if their prices were that competitive.  It's like you have ants crawling through a hole in your wall and to try and fix this you demolish the wall.

Finally I reiterate, you guys are just condoning this nonsense of purchasing power.

Also to you guys more concerned about the lack of single player mode, the Blizzard VP was surprised there was backlash at all.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2011/08/04/blizzard-vp-surprised-over-fan-reaction-to-diablo-3-online-requirements/

my argument is duping not botting.

The gear that those sites sell does not come from botting, no amount of botting is going to provide you with an infinite amount of Zod runes or uber powerfull rune words . Especially when you look at the price those guys are selling...( dirt cheap compared to the time it would take you to actually farm the items...).
What blizzard will provide compared to those sites is the knowledge that every item sold through Blizzard auction will most likely be legit...

The other difference is that those sites sell stuff that is unatainable for 99.99% of the players whereas on Blizzard auction you will purchase something that was obtained in game by another player so something actually attainable...

So basically you do not like a change that will most likely have no impact on you if you decide not to purchase anything ?

And do not take the casual for dumb people just because they are casual. You would be surprised at the amount of Wow players that have purchased in game stuff with real money and Wow does not provide any auction mechanism for this. People know this stuff exist and they know where to look.

Anyway I don't get why this bothers you, I have played MMORPG for over  10 years of my life, there has always been players buying in game stuff for money and it has never bothered me. I've never purchased anything and in one game I actually sold a load of in game cash for real cash ( Star Wars Galaxy) .

Always online isn't big problem since in this case you will be mostly playing online anyway.
Also item market is just regulation of what is already happening with tons more security for buyer and since everyone will be able to do it it might cut down on the amount of Chinese farmers due to lower prices.

Problem is I feel i don't really care anymore after all this time.

but its been so long since the last diablo came out, and many gamers when to WoW....
lets see what happens when its release. the company wants to have 2 million users online...

When real world money is involved with other games it's considered cheating, Guild Wars for example will ban you if they find out, I tried buying off one of those sites for guild wars ( i know i'm so bad I was 14 and I wanted good shit!) and I was banned about a day and a half later.

I am against this because I realize how cheap this really is, for example.. you see someone in the game with some incredible armor..who cares?They probably bought it anyway it takes the fun away from the game of going out questing and actually finding the items/gear yourself.
Plus people can probably just buy themselves to the top right away some 13 year olds will just bug their parents for their credit cards and buy everything they need.

The only way the auction house would make sense is if you could only buy stuff with the gold you found in game no real money involved, then that would be fun and it wouldn't ruin the experience as much.

I can somewhat understand the desire (I am not defending it though--I'm against gold farmer items all the time) to buy an item or gold for any triple-A MMORPG out there but I cannot understand why someone would like to do the same for a cooperative online CRPG like Guild Wars. Sounds very strange to me.

Also, any auction house would make sense if the items sold there were items generated by legit in-game mechanisms by players playing the damn game.

You are making some good points with those lazy kids ruining the in-game market and the overall experience for the other legit players but unfortunately you cannot avoid them. Note also that most of the time they aren't kids but men at their mid 20s-late 30s.