Attention to all would-be demon slayers, please lift your glasses high and bid a fond farewell to Diablo 3's most hated auction house.
In a new blog post at battle.net, the company revealed that it will be doing away with the service completely, and replacing it with the new looting system brough forth by the upcoming Reaper of Souls expansion.
"When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we've mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH 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," wrote Diablo III's Production Designer John Hight.
"With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we've decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III. We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of SoulsTM will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players."
Given the amount of utter, visceral hatred towards the service, it's a move that is, (and will continue to be, no doubt be) celebrated by a great many Diablo players. It got to the point that Blizzard even decided to not feature the system in the recently released console versions of the game.
Early on, lead designer Joshua Mosqueira cited a difference in ecosystems between PC and consoles as the reason behind the removal, saying, "There were some technical reasons we had to go with offline, but again once you have an offline experience, even if we wanted to bring in the auction house, it just becomes problematic."
But during a GDC talk earlier this year, on Thursday, the reason behind the service's lack of inclusion became a bit clearer. "Diablo 3" director Jay Wilson revealed that the game's Auction House "really hurt the games," reported Joystiq.
"I think we would turn it off if we could," says Wilson. However, while players opposed the idea of using real money to buy fictional equipment and were quite vocal about it, players on the opposite side of the debate were unheard, which begs the question if it was actually appreciated at all.
In any event, the auction house goes kaput on March 18, 2014.