What on earth did they do to the game while I was out of town?? Super choppy/laggy, hardly any blues much less rares dropping and my repair bill was 16k?!
They call it patch 1.0.3. It's the patch that's supposed to make the game more fun, more challenging, more rewarding, and actually give a penalty for death so that people can't just death zerg/corpse run their way through.
You know, because what I do in my game has sooooo much impact on your game that if I decide I want to just throw myself into the face of every mob I come across until I can beat them all, your gaming experience will be ruined. And we can't have that.
On the other hand, I've opted for the ultimate penalty for death, and just decided to go Hardcore only. I don't have to worry about repair costs for deaths, the AH is much more reasonable (items more reasonably priced, less crap clogging things up, etc.), and for some reason I only have specific zones that are consistently choppy (the oasis in Act 2 is the only one I can think of off the top of my head), blues, rares, and legendaries drop at a good rate... hard to say no to hardcore these days. It's the only reason I'm still playing.
ETA: And really, I don't know what the higher-ups at Blizzard are thinking right now (aside from maybe "please don't let us get canned when Vivendi sells Activision") but they really, really need to stop letting Jay Wilson talk. The man should not be allowed to open his mouth about the game any further, because every time he does it just pisses off more people. His most recent blunder was telling people that they're mis-remembering why they had fun with D2... because, ya know, there aren't a ton of people who replayed it just before D3 came out. And in the same interview/press release/why ever the hell he was talking he went on to say that the reason everyone loved Deckard Cain was because it was annoying listening to him say "Stay awhile and listen," every time you interacted with him. So they killed him for a good story point and they definitely didn't add any followers who are constantly repeating the same audio over and over and over and over and over and over again. Because that wouldn't have been GLORIOUS of them.