Alex Mayberry is the producer for Diablo III (he switched places with Rob Pardo).
So I guess that I and many others were flat out wrong in thinking they would patch on the 18th (the day the AH went down). It’s going to be interesting to see how the whole auction house and gold being soul bound in 2.0.1, will be handled.
It’s possible that gold really isn’t technically BoA; just restricted from being dropped on the ground and from being traded in the trade window; thus it can still be used on the gold AH for the next few weeks. It will also be interesting to see if loot 2.0 items (non-BoA) are allowed to be bought/sold on the AH.
The early launch also makes sense though; since the expansion data/content is already pre-downloaded and people will already be playing the 2.0.1 patch (just that the expansion content is locked until March 25th), there won’t be this huge initial influx of players trying to login simultaneously as players who are already logged in to Battle.net, should be able to just create a new game in order to begin playing the expansion content. This (in theory) should reduce the concurrency load on the authentication servers (which was the biggest point of failure on launch, and remains the most problematic even to this day).
