Robots are the key to a post-scarcity economy. When you run an auction house, though, scarcity is your bread and butter. Rare things drive your business, and too much good stuff will destroy prices across the board. If you’re Blizzard, that means locking bots out of Diablo 3 to protect your auction house money trough. So what’s the next limit Blizzard is going to strap around the Diablo 3 community? A limited number of games. Battle.net has the story.
Back in the Diablo 2 days, bots were the only way to see the truly rare loot drops. There were some items that only dropped three or four times in hundreds of millions of games. Of course, Blizzard did what they could to knock out the botters, but their efforts were always on the server side, where the player never saw it.
Locking the player out of his own game is a new step for Blizzard. Probably not a good one.