Yesterday Blizzard announced that the plan to remove the gold and real-money auction house from Diablo 3 permanently. According to Blizzard developers, the feature undermined the core game play mechanic of Diablo 3: Kill as many enemies as you can for the best gear and the most gold.
Diablo 3 production director John Height released a statement on Battle.net:
“When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades,” reads the post. “But as we’ve mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the [auction house] system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. We’re working out the details of how the auction house system will be shut down, but we wanted to share the news as soon as we made the decision in order to give everyone as much advance notice as possible.”
The auction house will be officially shut down on March 18th, 2014.