Just chiming in here. Alot of the voices in this thread seem to be saying "Everyone has internet stick it up your arse!"
This is an ignorant attitude. I loved Diablo 2 and played it extensively! I was going to buy D3 (I dont give a rat's ass about healing orbs), untill i heard the news about allways online. Now im not going to buy it, i AM going to crack it though. Why? because the address i live at is simply not elligable for ADSL, and i only really care about singleplayer. Simple as that! I reckon there is quite a bit of people in the same boat, and you guys spewing this banther clearly lack the empathy to imagine anybody could be worse of than you.
For shame!
Furthermore these kinds of DRM represent a rotten tendency in the industry, where you are merely buying licenses to use the client IN THE WAY THE COMPANY SEES FIT, instead of paying for the client itself, enabling you to use it ANY WAY YOU WANT! This ruins modding and alot of other community empowering things like mapmaking and whatnot, not to talk about how it is effectively erroding alot of consumer rights stuff that has taking quite a bit of while to build up.
Having said that, this whole battlenet 2.0 thing is just the new way for Blizzard to control their assets, and it has come natural to them on top of the way dota and korean e-sports were handled, not to talk about WoW. So who can blame em? How should they have done it? I dont know...