You could look at it that way, but I don't think it's entirely true. You generally got better items (as in, useful to someone) and great items were more common as well. Overall that made it more fun to farm - even satisfying at times.

What I don't like about the AH is how it takes the bargaining out of trading. The process in D2 was a bit troublesome (you had to create games with names like "WTS [item name]" for instance - no trade channel or anything), but apart from that it was just that much more satisfying to get a good deal.

You had to learn the prices of the market by talking to buyers/sellers, figure out by yourself what was actually worth something and you could do things like pushing the prices for a quick deal. You actually needed some skills to be good at trading (that or run into people who were completely ignorant to the prices of items - admittetly I took advantage of that a fair amount of times (and I felt good about it, haha!)).

Personally I found that a lot more fun than browsing around the AH.

D2 end difficulty was around act 2 inferno (or so, it's been a while since I played D2) so yeah, the bar for the top gear was lower than it is in D3. D2 had something that made things hellishly difficult at times though: Immune to fire/cold/poison/lightning/physical damage mobs. More interesting than D3 where you don't have to give a shit about the type of damage you deal.

In D2 I managed to get just about all the BiS items for my sorceress through a lot of trading (and one of the previously mentioned ignorant players - god bless him). At that point I stopped playing simply because now I had no goal. I could level to 99 sure, but that'd means hours upon hours of farming for nothing else than max level - I found those prospects too boring.

I'll probably trade for a while in D3 - if I manage to get a nice stock of gear/gold I'll probably sell something on RMAH and build up my stock again. Just like a little "Oh I got 30 minutes of time to kill, lets check RMAH/farm something" kind of thing.

Scrap that. So far it seems the ways to be successful at making money on the AH involves: Camping the AH, sniping cheap auctions or getting highest bid 1 second before auctions expire.

All of these options are so fucking dull they make me want to puke. Bring back the good old D2 bargaining trade style, fuck the AH, WoW can have that.

Another reason I can't even be bothered to fire Diablo up any more. It feels like a massive "skimming money off AH" profit spinner for blizz to me. Micro-transactions where they don't even have to give you anything. Fuck it.