The complaint was that you "had to buy gold on the RMAH." The commodities (gold, gems, crafting junk) section of the RMAH is not active. I should also mention that there are still trading forums that work on bartering, just like D2 does/did.
And you can choose not to use any of them.As has been said, the fact that things exist doesn't "force" you to use them.
I'd still love to hear why a game that requires you to use an online infrastructure doesn't have to actually provide it because it's not WoW. You didn't bring them up originally, but now that the conversation has moved on you keep going back to that point instead of explaining why you think this is acceptable behaviour from Blizzard.
Eh, servers have been working and stable for a while now. Yes, I do think fixing problems is acceptable behavior, and as far as I can tell the problems have been fixed. Explain why a problem that existed in the past but is no longer a problem is grounds for panning a game ad infinitum?
I disagree with this for a couple reasons. #1, the starter edition and practically the whole of normal mode do not give you an accurate representation of what the game is about. #2, because of #1, you have to pay $60 to even know if you'll like the actual game.
Maybe you're one of those people that doesn't mind a spoon-fed demo period and are willing to make your judgment based solely on that. Personally, if I'd known how much of a shit grind the actual Diablo game was going to be, I would have never bought it.
I actually thought the starter content gave a decent feel for the gameplay through somewhere mid-hell difficulty. There were difficulty ramp-ups, which is about par for the course in a Diablo game, and they felt appropriate to me. I also didn't expect a demo to fully illustrate and model the entire course of endgame; that's not what a demo is for.
As for grinding... well, D2 was mostly the same. IIRC the best path to getting high-level runes in D2 (and thus, the best gear, because runewords, yo) was to run Lower Kurast thousands of times opening the 2 randomly placed super chests that had a 0.5% higher chance of dropping runes. This wasn't an issue for most people, as everyone who was anyone had the same duped Enigma chestpiece, but that's another issue.
Hack 'n Slashers tend to be grindy. The problem is (and I even stated as such a few pages back in this thread) that there isn't much of an approachable goal with D3 yet. D2 had level cap, I guess, but it was so nebulous towards the end that it seemed pointless. All your skills were available by level 30, and the hell-viable ones were level 24 or 30, so after that point you were just putting stat points into Str/vit, or skill points into things you already had, to increase the numbers. And synergies, because you had to, to make even bigger numbers. It was still a grind, but it was a grind with a goal you could define for yourself.
So, if I can have a turn...
D2 had online-only content (realm- and ladder-only runewords, uber tristram, uber diablo, annihilus charms), rampant duping (to the extent that a game event revolved around duped SoJ's), skills that never worked over the entirety of the game's life, pigeonholed build options (synergies), cheap monster tactics (Iron Maiden, Duriel's spawnrush as you zoned in), just plain bugs (mana burn doing something like 250X the amount it should have), and an obviously rushed out the door 4th act. What about it was so timeless, especially when D3 has some of the same issues?