As spotted from PC Gamer, some former Blizzard and Blizzard North employees attended a panel at last weekend's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. During that panel, the group of former Blizz devs discussed the background of Diablo and their personal connections to the games Diablo IV Gold, and shared stories about making the popular franchise. In the panel discussion, the former lead designer on Diablo 3, Jay Wilson discussed the controversial auction house, explaining its beginnings and more.

"When I was at Blizzard," said Wilson, "the reason for doing the auction house in real money was security. It wasn't about money. We weren't expecting to earn enough money from it. The biggest issue in Diablo 2 was item duping and duping hacks and all Gold sellers and those things."

So, as Wilson explained, Blizzard's solution to fix this issue in Diablo 3 was to take control of the market for trading. It is also believed to be why the game made the move to require an in-continuous internet connection. Wilson affirms that the moment you allow offline clients, the hackers "got your information." Always online and auction houses were Blizzard's misguided attempts to manage the issues from Diablo 2.

However, shortly after its launch in 2012 the auction house in Diablo 3 was identified as one of the game's biggest flaws, constantly slammed and mocked by the gaming community. It was a challenge to remove it, and not because of technical difficulties. The reason for its sluggish 2014 removal was due to the fact that auction houses were one of the features that was promised for the game that was printed on all the retail packaging, and there were legal concerns about cutting the feature.

"The reason why we didn't take it off the moment we realized it was an issue was legally, we were not sure that we could cheap Diablo 4 Gold, because it was advertised on cardboard boxes" explained Wilson. "So we were able to sort out all legal issues, before we finally said 'OK, we believe it's worth trying even if we end up with one, but oh well.'"