Diablo 3 has two auction houses - one which deals in real money and another in in-game gold - through which players can buy and sell in-game items.

It was expected, Wilson noted during a GDC talk (via Joystiq), that a legitimate auction feature would reduce the use of fraud and black market sales, and that only a small number of players would use them.

 

The developer was wrong on both accounts, admitted Wilson. Almost every Diablo 3 player, he said, has used an auction house at some point, and over half of them on a regular basis.

This "damaged item rewards", he added, and the pursuit of money has detracted from what should be the game's real motivator - its campaign.

 

Wilson goes on to admit that the firm would ideally deactivate the auction houses. "I think we would turn it off if we could," he said, but suggests that it's "not as easy as that" since doing so could upset a large portion of the game's user base.

 

Read on at CVG.

 

The fans knew it. Why didn't you, Blizzard?

But a good deal of fans were only upset about the RL AH, not the AH in general. People were constantly trading and selling in D2 (and still are) via chats, and items were getting stolen, or misplaced, or eaten during crashes, etc etc. The AH was supposed to make the sales simpler, the transactions easier for the players. The AH is just a means for me to pursue harder levels, but I can see how some people would be AH obsessed. 

 

But I agree that as a whole, yeah. It's ruined the game. :/ 

I didn't like the auction house. Well, when I played it was Auction House vs drop rate.  It sort of took away from the game when it made more since to just use gold drop gear and buy stuff from the AH then to wear MF gear and hope for better items.

My whole first and second playthroughs I didn't use the auction house at all because I knew it would ruin the game for me completely and the whole point of a "loot drop game" where you're continually killing and hoping for better gear.  Searching through a catalog to min/max just isn't fun for me.

There should never have been an auction house at all. I don't want to buy my way through the game. I want to find stuff in the world that makes me better. I want to get rewarded for all the time spent playing a game like this. It's no fun. The game is short and lacks customization. It's a damn shame.

That was the thing, though. You could get past the first few playthroughs with loot you found. Once you got into Inferno, though, you are destined to gear up at the AH. The drop rates for the first half of the year it came out were terrible post Hell difficulty. It was a solid gear check wall, impenetrable.