http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/21/digital-diablo-iii-purchases-restricted-for-up-to-3-days/#more-113163

Apparently if you purchased Diablo 3, you will be restricted to a "trial account" for your first 3 days. This means that you can't finish act 1, can't use the auction houses, can't matchmake with people who don't also play on trial accounts, can't play with anyone outside of your "region" & you have to deal with a pretty low level cap.

As was mentioned in the "Actual d3 thread", the limitation is until the payment is cleared. So it could be 1 hour, or up to 72.
Nothing to see here, move along.

Ah, bummer, missed that it had already been posted.
And payment has been cleared? Is that not something that is done instantly, before you have got your key?

I know of a WoW exploit that you could basically play for free, which had to do with cancelling your subscription. I don't really want to go in details here, but as I recall, it has to do with time required by Blizzard to clear the payment.
This has been done so you can't use a stolen CC for example, enter with a clean D3 account, do your money laundering, then leave. So I somehow doubt that anyone will meet the full 72 hours, though 12 hours may be possible.

I think I've heard of the exploit, but was that not a quirk of the subscription model that WOW used?

And would it not be a lot easier to just restrict auction houses for a few days for new accounts, to avoid this, rather than restrict the entire game?

I get the issues with trying to prevent CC fraud, but I don't think their solution should affect legitimate customers. It would be better to let the occasional CC frauder through the cracks for a couple of days then what they're doing now. Even if a user only has to wait 2 hours, that's still 2 hours more than they should be expected to wait.

Assuming everything works as it should, you can start the game by yourself, and in 4 hours or less (time needed to download, install and level to 13?) you will have the full version of the game. In case the payment takes more time to clear, other than the fact that you should first go check what is going on with your payment options, you have the starter edition, which you can continue playing once the payment is cleared.
The other 2 options would be that either you do not have access to your game until payment is cleared, so you start the downloading etc 4 hours later, or that you allow possible abuse in case of payments not clearing. Blizzard chose the middle ground, now it remains to be seen how well that decision will work.

I'll say again what I said in the other thread:

The issue is that full accounts can be used during that time to harass legitimate players with gold spam etc. Blizzard always got a lot of flak from players for failing to prevent that in D2 and mind you, it was pretty fucking annoying. Imagine WoW gold spammers but 1000x more annoying.
And honestly, if your bank takes 72h to clear the transaction then what the hell?

I've honestly never heard of a similar system being used and nor has it ever taken more than a few seconds for payment to get cleared. Is issues with slow payment clearing common in other parts of the world? If all this does is to limit accounts until payment is cleared, then I guess it is not a big problem (for me that would probably take a shorter amount of time for payment to clear than for the game to load). The article made it sound far different.

I never played Diablo 2 online other than with close friends, but when playing WOW, the spamming mainly came from trial accounts at first and then from hacked accounts once they limited messages from trial accounts.

RPS.

Yeah, they really lost a lot of respect in my eyes by that article alone. Quite franky I am surprised Blizzard allowed people online with 'full' version without payment authentification in the first place. Still, doesn't change the fact that if the game had proper, full offline singleplayer, they could JUST OPEN THAT.

You just go on laughing (or start, if for some reason you weren't), but this might theoretically push an already mentally unstable person over the limit. I mean, in his time, customers got respect, not scorn and suspicion from the shopkeeper. Now if you'll excuse him, he needs to go find a group of people and hack them to pieces, because the voices in his head told him it's the only thing left to do.

I think that it's long established that Blizzard doesn't respect their customer and then turn it into an advantage by clever PR, thus making even bigger idiots of people :-P

OK, that makes more sense. Seemed like an odd restriction to make. OTOH, if they gave refunds during that period it would be a reasonable restriction to make.

But, then again they claimed that they didn't make a singleplayer game because they were worried that people would decide they wanted to play multiplayer and would have to create a new character.

I'm not sure who they thought they were fooling, but I don't think that worked.