And yet… I feel like Blizzard could have made an effort to make its single player game run offline. The multiplayer is fantastic, but give us something to fallback on.
It's a pretty sad case of putting business concerns over user experience. If it wasn't an anti-piracy thing they would have happily made a offline mode because it would drastically reduce the server load and all the support and development costs that massive multiplayer games have.
If it's not surprising in the slightest, then they should have planned to scale.
It's essentially the Ubisoft Route (Assassins Creed 2 et al) that everybody was incredibly critical of, and they actually removed it by now.
But when golden boy Blizzard pulls shit like that, suddenly everybody is like "Awwww, yeah Diablo!" and I see only few criticisms about the always-online system. (compared to Ubisoft)
One of the reasons I heard for the missing offline single player was "Cheating vs. Real Money Auctionhouse". This seems fallacious to me. Just provide an offline mode that is completely separate from the online part and also separate from the Auctionhouse.
shrug