Diablo 3 - Cash Auctions

First off, what the ?

Don’t Need It? Put It Up For Auction!
Nearly everything found in the game, including gold, can be exchanged with other players directly or through the auction house system. So say you’re a witch doctor and you’ve just found an incredibly rare, incredibly powerful axe that only barbarians can use. In the previous Diablo games your best option might have been to sell the axe to an in-game vendor, but in Diablo III, you now have the ability to list that axe in the auction house for your fellow barbarian players to bid on. And you know another player will probably appreciate the true value of that axe more than some heartless vendor who’ll likely just melt it down for scrap….

 Even gold ?

Then I saw this:

The Choice Is Yours
Use of either the real-money or gold-based auction house is completely optional -- that decision can be made on a per-item basis, and both versions of the auction house are functionally the same. In addition, players have the option to simply sell the items they obtain to in-game vendors for gold. They can also trade items to other players through a direct character-to-character trading system in the game in exchange for gold, other items, or just an overwhelming sense of goodwill.

Real money for in game items. Its supposed to be only for the auction house and its optional but what the hell has Blizzard become. Its become Blizzard ActivisiSUN this is just a vailed layer of the pay to win model and my interest in Diablo 3 is almost all but gone. The players make no money out of these auctions and Blizzard just pockets the profits themselfs.