The mistake came down to two key areas D2R Items. The first was that the auction house had a real-money component, allowing players to purchase loot in real-money. This allowed Blizzard to criticism of engineering low-quality loot drops in order to increase market exchanges, since it took a small cut off of every transaction.

Whether or not this was the case, the overall quality of loot was extremely poor at launch, and fans were justifiably suspicious--especially given that Blizzard's acquisition from Activision was only a few years old at this point, and longtime Blizzard fans were watchful for any resulting changes in corporate culture.

Additionally, the existence of a real-money marketplace made anti-cheat measures that much more vital for the safety in the gaming. If a person could produce something of value infinitely, such as, for example, this could create scams and reduce the value of things.

That's part of the"always online" component that resulted in frustration for players in the initial days. If you're always online, the system is constantly checking for any glitches that could be cheating, like duplication issues, though that didn't make players who wanted to exclusively play offline feel any better.

What Blizzard faced was a feature that Best place to buy D2R items fans didn't appreciate, but which was designed to help support the technical foundations of another feature that fans didn't like.