If you don’t have a smart phone capable of running Blizzard’s Authenticator app and want to use Diablo 3‘s upcoming “Real Money Auction House”, you’ll need to purchase one of their physical Authenticators. This means that on top of the ongoing issues with DRM disconnections and errors, hacking continues to be a massive nuisance — even people with Authenticators are being hacked, as confirmed by many players. If only players were allowed to have offline games, none of this would be a problem.
As for the Auction House itself, the market for D3 gold is already booming, and thanks to the use of bots some people are making plenty of real money already. Activision-Blizzard is jealous of this profit, naturally, and wants to stop it. But much like real enforcement, the illegal side of the equation won’t be affected by authentication, because they’re not using Blizzard’s auction house! Check out this interview with an anonymous gold farmer: