I'm intrigued by how the "everyone can buy and sell their items for real money in the AH" thing. Since Hardcore mode has more item sinks than the normal game mode, there's a decent chance that item values (of "fixed" items by some metric) could stabilize at some non-zero value in it.

I strongly suspect it'll be ruined by bots, but who knows? Perhaps a large part of the 12-year development cycle that wasn't spent on the storyline went toward some impressive anti-OCR botting measures.

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