0. Get rid of the Auction House and rebalance the game so that you can actually find usable gear from time to time
This has already been done. Thanks. However, it's easily possible that Blizzard may choose to release a patch nerfing loot drops back into the abyss once they've fleeced all the expansion purchases.
At the moment, though, it's hilarious. If, like millions of people, you pre-ordered Diablo 3 but haven't played it in a year, log in. Play for a few hours. Watch in awe as you effortlessly replace all of the l33t gear you bought from the AH with stuff you actually found yourself. It's almost like the game isn't drowning you in a sea of inferior pants and seeing how long you can last before you give in to Auction House temptation. You get fewer drops, but the best drops are consistently better than the best drops you used to get. You just have 1/4 as many to sift through.
My cynical side really is flaring up, though. I strongly suspect that this balance state is only temporary. To really drive home how temporary this heroin shot of raw player power probably is, Blizzard went ahead and gave everyone 50% bonus experience points for the next three weeks.
I'm fairly confident that seven days after Reaper of Souls comes out, someone will already be level 70 with God knows how many Paragon levels and every complete gear set, and then anyone using any other build or any play style other than the optimized power build will get nerfed into oblivion again.
1. Enable offline and LAN play and uninstall your DRM from my bumhole.
Even when there was an auction house, there wasn't sufficient reason to deny us this. The current online mode could still exist as a secure, super-legit mode where all player progress was constantly validated by the servers, and the rest of us could have enjoyed the goddamned game without 1500 ms latencies killing us all the damn time.
Diablo 2 had this right (well, almost - more later). Single player mode, LAN play, open battle.net play, and ladder play for "srs biznis xhardcorex" online-only mode.
Blizzard's apologetics on the matter are laughable, transparent, and offensive. Just read the comments and/or just think about it for five minutes.
Even worse, Blizzard loves to flip out over fabricated "suspicious activity" warnings and lock you out of your own account for the game that you bought with your own money. Lost access to your old email address and/or forgot the answer to your security question? That's ok, for another sixty bucks, you can rent Diablo 3 for another couple of years. What a deal.
I haven't even begun to do this topic justice. I have more to say, and I will.
2. Cut the price in half and add at least one more class
The bonus content is a joke. They're charging $40 for one new character class (in addition to the previous 5), one new act (in addition to the previous 4), and Adventure Mode, a.k.a., the Shut The Fuck Up, Azmodan toggle button. It speaks volumes that they claim that Adventure Mode is the biggest draw for buying the expansion. They're charging the majority of $40 just to remove obnoxious content that wasn't even entertaining the first time through.
Kind of makes them wish they'd though to include in-game pop-up ads in vanilla D3, huh? Hey Blizzard, how about I PayPal you three dollars so the Templar won't crawl up my ass every time I manage my equipment between grinds? Pretty please? I'm only half-joking right now.
3. Make enemy level scaling optional. Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno wasn't broken.
This is only #3 because it is a point where I could respectfully disagree with someone else. If you didn't know, the latest Diablo 3 patch makes it so that enemies in the main plot of the game don't have a fixed power level. Instead, they level up whenever you do, rendering the entire concept of experience levels irrelevant.
YMMV, but I also find that rushing through the game on the highest initially available difficulty level is actually easier than it used to be to try to rush through Normal. Why? Because trying to rush used to bring you face-to-face with the brick wall that is an enemy of a higher level than you. You could look forward to growing strong enough to win if you backtracked just a little. Now, you just steamroll everything, and if it's too easy, you raise the difficulty and reload, and if it's too hard, you lower the difficulty and reload again.
Which I guess is fine, but that should at most be reserved for the open-world, plot-free extravaganza of Adventure Mode. People hated when Elder Scrolls: Oblivion did it, and IMO, they should hate Blizzard for doing it now.
At the very least, I think this should be implemented as another game mode, called something like "Legacy Campaign Mode" or something. I also think that it would be cool to have a mode where you play a character with no shared stash, as if you had to play a brand new account with no leg up for the first time. Currently, you can't do this. You can walk right into Tristram and buy a full set of gear. This kind of sucks if you actually want to play the game, but it's peachy if you just want to grind five characters up to 60 as quickly as possible. No, thanks. :(
4. Give us skill trees and real choices. Give each character an identity.
I would rank this higher, but this would probably be the hardest thing to implement, and it would rock the boat the hardest. Some people might even like the runes or whatever. Not me.
I remember Diablo 2. Choices stuck. How you spent skill points determined how you could play for the whole game. Seeing how far you could get with a less-than-optimal build path was often the most fun in the game - Echant Sorceress or Poison Necromancer, for example. Not that Diablo 2 was perfect - There were too many noob traps, but I still remember that game as a success.
5. Stop fucking up your plots. Listen to your fans and/or hire people who know what the hell they're doing in the first place (from a perspective of making fun games, not from a perspective of making money and safeguarding your monies)
The damage is already done, and I doubt that it would even be possible to revert a fraction of the dumbfuckery that is the ear-chewingly horrible D3 campaign.
I'll just leave this here, though. Food for thought, if they ever want to stop sucking on the plot front:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150111877
FFS, Blizzard. In the future, hire someone who worked on Dragon Age or something, if you can still find anyone with a soul still willing to work for you.
By contrast, Torchlight 2 kind of sucked at plot too, but god damn, they knew how to get the fuck out of your face and let you play your goddamned game. It was sort of a sprawling clusterfuck, but they didn't try to force you to care about it with piles of cutscenes, endless hireling chatter, and rampant inconsistency. Mathematically, less isn't more, but when we're talking about raging ass-suckery, less IS better.
In Diablo 2, Diablo said a total of 8 words, and it was awesome.
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