Follow-up on some comments of the previous thread, so as to not derail that comment thread. Several people remarked that if somebody thought that the AH was making Diablo 3 too easy, the simple solution would be to not use it. That is one of these phrases which at first look appear rather obvious, but then when you see what happens in reality isn't obvious at all. For example I said pretty much exactly the same when Blizzard added a dispellable buff that nerfed WoW raids, and some people were complaining about the nerf: If you don't like it, don't use it! But that simple solution was never accepted as viable. Everybody claimed that if the buff was there, you had to use it, because handicapping yourself wasn't acceptable. And of course now people say the same about the option to not use the AH in Diablo 3.

I think the question is one of your reference point for evaluating your own performance, and ultimately a question of maturity. Everybody operating under exactly the same rule set, using the maximum of all available means to succeed, makes the performance of everybody comparable. If everybody uses the nerf buffs in WoW raids, you can see how good everybody is by looking at the resulting epic gear. If some players play with the buff, and others without, those who dispelled the buff risk to look bad, because they end up with the same gear as people who played less good. And to some people that is not acceptable.

Other players don't care about how they look, or what people think about them. They have their own, internal reference point. To them beating a raid without buff is a greater success than beating it with the buff, thus has higher value, even if the epic reward is the same. Gevlon once organized the "undergeared" raid project. Other players organized Iron Man WoW with even more restrictive rules. As long as you only care about your own standards for performance, you can play under whatever set of rules, restriction, and handicaps you like.

I was considering playing Diablo 3 without using the AH long before people suggested it in today's thread, as I don't see Diablo 3 (nor MMORPGs) as a competitive endeavor. In the specific case of the Diablo 3 AH, I very much see the risk that using the feature destroys a lot of the item-collecting fun of the game. In general, if there are ways to modify the difficulty level of a game, I usually don't go for either extreme, but try to fine-tune difficulty to exactly the level where it is most fun, because it provides a good challenge without either being too easy nor too frustratingly difficult. That is obviously a lot easier in single-player games, but to me Diablo 3 is one. But I fully understand the other point of view, where players refuse to handicap themselves by not using features like the AH.