Lessons that should have been learnt by Blizzard?

Most gamers have gotten their hands on Diablo 3 (D3) are and are spending a lot of time fighting the minions of hell. The release has been troubling, but nevertheless, the great gameplay of Blizzard games still hold up to the flaws of the DRM.

The server crashes on the first day was surprising, considering Blizzard held a stress test that worked (i.e. stressed the server enough to crash it), and that, with the number of pre-orders they received, should have given them enough information to determine how much server resources they would require. The only unknown is that of online purchases made on release day, or shortly before that.

There have been cases of hacking, and that is hardly surprising with the Real Money Auction House and character data saves been made on the Blizzard server instead of the client's machine. But interestingly, unlike World of Warcraft (WoW), when Blizzard restores your items after you report a hacking, your character is rolled back to a much earlier state, potentially losing levels and the latest acquired gear.

The last I checked, Blizzard made WoW, and like WoW, D3 has persistent online DRM, characters stored on Blizzard servers, and has gameplay that's heavily gear dependent. Also, WoW faced all the problems currently plaguing D3, like poor server stability launch-day and hacking, so why isn't Blizzard doing what WoW did?

(The later part of this post is going to devolve into a Real Money Auction House [RMAH] rant.)

The fact that we have to be always online to play is not purely for fighting piracy, but also because Blizzard needs to have the characters on their servers to prevent people from hacking to get better items. Items equals money with the RMAH, and having a surplus of items in the market will push costs down, making items not worth selling, dropping sales and thus Blizzard will earn less money from it. Players who prefer to play single player are thus forced to be online all the time.

The restoration system likely works for the same reason. You don't get back your most recent gear because they are not going to make another copy of it. The hacker has it, and giving returning to gear to the player increases the number of copies of the item. Granted, the player might not sell it immediately, but in future he may, and if Blizzard rolls back the items on the character so easily, players can easily fake a hack, passing expensive items to another account and then reporting to get more items to sell.

A lot of problems of D3 are there simply because of the RMAH, which aggravatingly, isn't even ready yet. I am against the RMAH, but very keen to see how it will affect the economy. Will gold be rendered useless? Will the gold auction house still have high quality items? It would make sense to sell it for real money if I'm honest. Of course, you could sell gold for money and then use the money to get items from the RMAH, and Blizzard will happily take a cut from both sales.