This past weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, three former Blizzard and Blizzard North heavyweights gave a panel talk on the Diablo series and their respective roles in its history. Matt Householder was the producer, Matt Uelmen was in charge of music and sound design, and Jay Wilson had various roles before becoming the lead designer for Diablo 3.

The timeline gets pretty interesting around the mid-2000s, when World of Warcraft basically took off and Blizzard North had just closed (the studio's last day was August 1, 2005). Jay Wilson joined Blizzard around this time, and Diablo 3, which Blizzard North was working on, was moved "in-house" under his direction.

One area Wilson discusses is the tradable rune system that Diablo 3 had for a time, before switching to a more selective system with a player choice component. At the time, Blizzard was obsessed with perfect game design."

"If you look at Ferrari, they build non-viable cars to turn corners 0.1 second faster. Lamborghini wants their cars to be cool and fast. Sometimes that's better, but we wanted a perfect design, so if we found a flaw, we took it out."

Wilson clearly has a fondness for the old system, and here he sees the downside of a perfectionist mindset. He says that Path of Exile is an example of "a similar system that does a great job (and has its problems) but is so much fun that I don't mind."

The talk then turned to Diablo 3's more controversial elements: the "always online" requirement and real money auction houses.

"When I was at Blizzard, the reason for a real-money auction house was security," he said. But the biggest problem with Diablo 2 was the duping of items, the duping of hacks, and the sellers of gold bullion and all that."

As Wilson succinctly puts it: "There are few ways to solve this problem without controlling the trading market. There are many good ways to do it, but that was our thinking at the time. The trading market is in the game, and we control it, and hackers can't control it."

"[Always] online is the same," Wilson said. 'As soon as you go offline, you have to expose the client/server, and if you do that, the hacker catches you.' But we couldn't say that because we don't poke the hackers. We do this for security reasons," the hacker would say.

The most interesting element of the auction house is that when the decision was made to discontinue the auction house, Blizzard began panicking internally over something relatively trivial. It was written on the box as a selling point.

"The short answer about the profit," Wilson said, "is it made a little money, nothing compared to WoW, we didn't expect that ... We really thought of it as a courtesy to make the game safer.

"I'd be surprised if we made more than 10 or 15 million (dollars). Sounds like a lot of money, but WoW probably made that every 10 seconds. It was not popular.

And then the delay in decision and action: "When we realized it was a problem, we didn't take it down right away because we didn't think we could legally take it down because it was advertised on the box, and we didn't think we could take it down.

"So we actually went to great lengths to try to resolve all the legal issues before finally saying it's worth a try, and if it comes to litigation, oh well."

It's fascinating to hear Wilson talk about Diablo 3 from this perspective, since his hands (and tongue) were understandably tied at the time. Nowadays, "always online" is so common that no one looks at it anymore, but at the time it was treated as an enormous insult by some players. Auction houses have also split their loyalties as never before. Compared to some of the things Blizzard is currently doing in terms of monetization, $10-15 million in lifetime profits would seem ancient.