I am traditionally a Blizzard apologist, having purchased every single release and sub-release from the company since 1994, and put up with WoW forums whining insanity for 5 of those years.
But I think my defense of them ends here. I won't be pre-ordering D3, and there's a reasonable chance I won't be buying it, penny-arcade to the contrary.
The issue at hand is quite relevant to me: I spent several thousand hours of my life in Diablo II and its expansion. I have purchased both several times over the past 11 years. Well over 90% of that playtime was in an off-line community, or in mods of one form or another.
While I have been playing D2 this year a lot with my friends in the form of the amazing Median XL mod, even my traditional D2 play archiving and messing with character and item files, editing them to experiment or to restore items lost in a HD failure, and using Plug-Y, which while only technically a mod, allowed me to do things with the game that kept me playing it well past when it would have frustrated me too much.
Also I have been LANning D2 recently with my gf and some friends of hers in regional australia, and they have terrible Internet connections.
Further more, I tried Blizzard's way with Stacraft 2. And it wasn't good. I am constantly lagged out, unable to access profile and friends functionality or even load the game at all, because my Australian 100 mbps broadband cable connection doesn't route well to the overseas servers. My experience with SC2 has been horrid, and this was a game in which I only played online opponents - if my lag was bad, I couldn't play anyway. Imagine my frustration if the same is to happen with a single-player, or worse, a game I do nothing but coop with my friends with.
I was open-minded about always-on requirements, but now I am totally burned, and will not purchase such thing ever again. Even Steam gives me occasional hassles, and it has local servers.
But leaving all that aside, I was independently appalled at the official responses from Blizzard. Really, guys? You are surprised? Really guys, it's about stopping hacks? Stone of Jordan duping did way less damage to D2 than not being able to click on menu items in Starcraft 2 because of PACKET LOSS to your bloody servers.
I have to ask - is this really the same company that gave me spawn copies of War2, Diablo and Starcraft so I could play with my siblings?
No, no it's not.