online only was the deal breaker for me, this class of game i like playing to kill a few hours on train journeys,
and thats before we get to real money Auction hours and all the hacking issues.
Glad my pre-order collectors edition failed to arrive at Game, pre-ordered torchlight 2 on steam, at least steam has an OFFLINE mode...
sadly i think we are in a transition from boxed games, to online style streaming being the ONLY way to play games, with Diablo 3s always on DRM being the middle ground, and lets face it, how long before EA or Blizzard cotton on to the fact that with the ENTIRE game streamed they can turn it off when they want to force you to buy a new game.
I agree that online only was not a wise decision and did not work out for them (with all of the exploits players were still able to utilize and all of the accounts that were hacked). The single biggest complaint I hear from people is that it was online only and they had only intended to play it single-player, and this is a very legitimate issue.
I also think we are in transition, but I'm not as paranoid as you are. It's not entirely a matter of forcing you buy the new game, it's also a matter of maintaining these servers beyond the point of revenue covering the expenses. This is a more complicated issue that I don't wish to expand upon though.
It's, quite honestly, a terrible game.
Save your money. Buy torchlight 2 in a month.
If you honestly think Diablo 3 is a "terrible" game, then you clearly have not played a lot of games in your lifetime. I am not a D3 defender, but D3 is not a terrible game. It's clear that it wasn't your cup of tea, and that's fine.
I'm also looking forward to Torchlight 2.
Torchlight 2 seems like it will be really good. The videos I've watched from the beta look fantastic.
D3 was fun in Normal. Nightmare added a bit of challenge. Hell got boring. In Inferno now and I'm sick of knowing it takes an hour to grind out like 150-200k gold and that individual item upgrades are in the 3-5 million price range. I can progress ok in Act 1, but it's tedious and unrewarding. I haven't had a single item drop that's useful for me. No legendaries with over 80 hours played. D2 endgame was fun doing MF runs, Baal runs, leveling, etc. This is "Oh gawd, those soul lashers have WHAT affixes?" (Shielding, Mortar, Invulnerable Minions, Fast, etc) It doesn't make the game fun or challenging.
I find what you're saying perplexing because my experiences have been the opposite. I actually thought normal was really, really boring, and things got progressively better until I played Act 2 Inferno for the first time. I still think Act 1 Inferno is the most fun I've had in Diablo 3, and it's the last time you're allowed any kind of freedom or creativity on how you want to approach the game.
Grinding gold is one of the least efficient ways to amass wealth in Diablo, although it's good in terms of getting the initial investment required to start taking advantage of the commodity market. I agree though, tier 1 and even 1.5 gear is inflated, and unfortunately, this is the kind of gear you need to progress beyond Act 2 in Inferno. I also agree that it's depressing, and almost pointless to play beyond a certain point simply because the game isn't dropping USABLE items in enough quantity to reward the player for his/her efforts. It's not the set/legendary drop rates that are the problem, it's what I just outlined.
I personally hated boss runs in D2. It was ok for the first few months, but after you've logged in thousands, and thousands, and thousands of runs, the sheer repetitiveness and tedious nature of it really gnaws at you. I've come to hate almost everything in life that is tedious and repetitious, but doesn't offer any tangible reward. That's just my personal opinion though.
I also agree with the stupid affix combinations you can run into in Inferno. Blizzard doesn't know how to handle difficulty in their games, what they've created is artificial difficulty that creates frustration and not accomplishment. There's little to no skill in this game to begin with (and there never really was any in Diablo in general, it's not a skill based game), so there's nothing you're getting out of this (which is made worse in conjunction with the horrible drops).