The Auction House has been announced at the press event, providing a great way for players to trade and gain loot. There are two variations of the AH, one that permits trading for in-game currency and the other uses real world currency for it’s transactions.

The Auction House uses an anonymous player to player transactional system. It’s no secret that Diablo and Diablo 2 had it’s own virtual market for buying/selling items. Blizzard has taken an intelligent initiative to control that market and keep it in-game, promoting legitimacy and stifling scamming. This author is excited to consider the potential of being awarded for spending time in his beloved virtual reality, Sanctuary by cashing in with real life currency for those long nights searching for loot. Two markets create a stimulated economy for both casual and hardcore players. Some people might want to keep their trading in-game but more dedicated players may want to spend those dollars to truly twink out their toon.

The real currency Auction House will not be available to Hardcore players.

If you have further questions, check out DiabloFans’ Q&A with Jay Wilson and the Official Blizzard Diablo 3 Auction House FAQ!

Much to the dismay of hardcore LAN partiers everywhere, Diablo 3 will require an active internet connection to play. However, looking on the bright side of things, it seems Blizzard has totally revamped the party/social experience of the “waiting lobby” in Battle.net. You now have a visually appealing friends list, which gives you an at-a-glance overview of your friends online status. It also seems you will be able to form parties outside of games, while you are still in the Battle.net lobby. Your Diablo 3 character selection screen will also have visual indications of your characters status and difficulty completion, these “tokens” can be a pile of bloody skulls (hardcore) to new icons on your class tabard; it’s overwhelming how sexy they make statistics about your character.

Bashiok announced on the World of Warcraft forums that there will be a system put in place for Diablo 3 players to reset their skill points, allowing more ease of experimentation with skill points as you gain, or even just allowing you room to mess up once in a while, and not have to make a brand new character as a consequence.

Also, Bashiok notes that the system that will be put in place for Diablo 3 will not be identical to the World of Warcraft respec system, and players will not be able to respec their characters so liberally.

“There will almost definitely be some sort of system to respec; however, it isn’t likely to be as liberal as World of Warcraft. We don’t want to lock a player into a system that punishes them for mistakes, experimenting, or lack of knowledge early on in the game. We also don’t think a system that allows immediate, complete, and at-a-whim changes to a character spec matches the feel of Diablo. It’s likely to be somewhere in between.

That said we still feel like the desire to play the same class again that you may have played before is still a part of the game, and with some ability to respec could potentially require other incentives. “

Rob Pardo revealed in a recent interview with 1UP that in the most likely case, the payment structure (Buy the game, play free online.) of Battle.net will not be changed. Blizzard is not planning on utilizing a subscription model like in World of Warcraft, but rather follow the model of its predecessor, Diablo II.

I’d like to share with you a few key questions I found interesting during 1UP’s Interview With Rob Pardo.

1UP: Speaking of the WOW experience, other action-RPG games have attempted a subscription model of sorts, can you talk at all about that for Diablo III?

RP: Well, ultimately, we’ll decide on the final business model of the game in the future, but I don’t think you’re going to see a subscription model in the realm of WOW. It’s a boxed product game, it will be more similar to say, the Diablo II or the StarCraft II model.

1UP: Can you talk about any specific Battle.net changes that will be made for Diablo III?

RP: Battle.net is in constant evolution; for each game we really add a lot of features to Battle.net. And right now we’re really focusing on the Battle.net features for StarCraft II. But we definitely have been keeping Diablo III in mind also. I think probably sometimes towards the end of the year, we’re going to really start talking about the new Battle.net features as they pertain to StarCraft 2, and a lot of those features will carry over to Diablo III.

1UP: Will it be similar to Diablo II, where it’s around five, maybe a few more, classes in the core game?

RP: I don’t think we’re saying today, but it will be very similar to the previous games. [Note: This was asked and answered before the FAQ for the Diablo III site went up, where five classes were confirmed.]

1UP: As a bonus nostalgia kick, the demo had Deckard Cain. Are there any other nostalgic bits you can touch on? Will Wirt be the key to the cow level?

RP: [Laughs.] You’ll have to wait and see.