Diablo 3 took a few hours to get to max level on the first character, an hour max on the second, even less if you had friends. Items are already level-gated in

Diablo 3 took a few hours to get to max level on the first character, an hour max on the second, even less if you had friends. Items are already level-gated in the game anyway, so you'd need to come up with a convoluted gear-score system to judge power-level of gear. D3's auction house made the game suck because the combination of game difficulty at Inferno and the way the loot dropped meant that the fastest way to gear up was to do chest runs where you ignored all the enemies. The extreme imbalance on the AH also meant that top end gear was stupid expensive and everything else was dirt cheap, limiting mobility for those who chose to "play the AH".