@starvinggamer: It's option B) tho not quite as bad you put it. The console versions already have a similar fix implemented. It definitely going to be easier to get gear relevant to your character. They are basically circumcising the awful amount of bullshit loot that is useful to no one, as well. But it's not going to be as dire as you think. The current Inferno endgame loot drops are just ridiculous. I went back to playing it recently on PC because i convinced my brother to play as well and we had a hell of a time, but I basically did not find a single weapon upgrade from inferno act2 mp0 to act2 mp1; that's an entire games length worth of drops.
We made a pact to not buy a single item on the AH with him. Because as soon as you cross that barrier, you finding loot for yourself that as an upgrade will become a thing of the past. I can pay 1-2 euro to get more money then i will farm in a week and increase my barbs stats to twice the survivability and twice the dps without any effort. I pay more for coffee every day. Heck even if you discount the RMAH, the AH itself still does the exact same thing, just requires you to farm (for gold or shit to sell, not really in any significant hopes of finding something for yourself).
As soon as I got any other character to 60 and decked them out in the bare basics for not even half a mil (less gold then you get just going through content) all drive to play on Inferno completely evaporated, each time. Because at that point what the fuck is the point? You buy AH items which are 10x better then what you have when reaching 60 for peanuts. Then. Go through Inferno mp"X". But why? If all the challenge is reduced because you have purchased gear from AH. You can increase the mp difficulty, but then you are only increasing it to compensate for the AH items. Which bring us back to square one, why then did you buy items from the AH to only bring up the difficulty. Chances of upgrading yourself are still negligible, it more assured that you will just farm with little to no challenge for the next upgrade, then increase the mp. And so on in a perpetual cycle of artificially decreasing the difficulty and then increasing it once again, with 0 sense of achievement.
At least when you ignore the AH there is a sense that you are achieving your own progression, slowly but assuredly and increasing the difficulty because of the upgrades you managed to be able to get through hours of blood sweat and tears. Gradual able to increase the difficulty because of your effort that made it possible and surviving with only what you got. But I shudder at thinking about trying to do that when playing solo (playing with 2 people the entire time we got better drops by default and were able to share and swap fund loot to at least keep up).
And it totally worked. The strictly enforced mutual rule of not going to the AH made me jump for joy and yell loud enough to wake neighbors when we got a barbarian set weapon to drop (tho even with loot sharing i was at a point of desperation as the difficulty kept climbing while my gear stayed mostly the same for the longest time). Something I have never experienced back when playing my monk in Inferno near launch.
Frankly I've grown to like D3's "always online drm" as it became very obvious how much smoother online gaming experience became (it even recognized we were on the same lan). And the strict no hacking the game it enforces (as i have spoiled quite a few dungeon crawlers for myself that way eventually). But the AH was the one renaming beef I had with D3, the single major design flaw I saw and apparently Blizzard finally came around to the same answer.
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