The game was RUINED FOREVER for me when I realised which way the plot was going.
Gameplay is solid, plot is a disaster. I have absolutely no idea what Blizzard is thinking. Probably $'s.
Plot was too bad for me to take seriously, and I'm not sure why that'd interfere with playing the game anyway. I mean, unless you were playing it for the story, in which case I assume it'd have run out of story and then gotten boring anyway rather quickly.
That said, what surprises me is that your followers and craftsmen actually have decent and fairly well-fleshed-out stories/interactions, which just makes the plot even more bizarre. It's like they put actual effort into your hirelings, then got somebody's six year old to do the main storyline.
The incompetence does return in your NPC shoutouts, however. How hard was it to make a generic statement that doesn't sound like they're making fun of generic statements?
How is it textbook trolling to observe that Blizz built a game with RMT and are successively patching it to make it harder and harder to play without buying gold and items?
Darkmere pretty much covered this, but I'd also like to point out that blaming everything on the RMAH, without any particular reason to assume that's the case, also counts. "It got harder, therefore Blizzard's trying to force us to spend real money" isn't completely invalid as a theory, but if you wanna scream it from a rooftops as an absolute fact you'd better have some damned good evidence beyond "it got harder" and "RMAH exists," especially when "it got harder" usually refers to patching out completely broken cheese.