A Customer support agent has posted on Diablo 3′s official forums confirming suspicions that there is a wait period on all digital purchases of the game.
Kaltonis says that anyone who purchase the digital edition of the game could be forced to wait up to three days for their game to unlock.
Specifically, players will be restricted to the free demo (a.k.a. Starter Edition) of the game. This imposes pretty hefty restrictions: characters are capped at level 13, cannot go past the Skeleton King boss in Act 1, cannot access the Auction House, and cannot join games with friends that own the full game.
Kaltonis does say in the post that the delay in receiving the full game “is often much quicker than [72 hours].” But the justification that he gives for the delay is extremely vague and unsatisfying: “it is a necessary step to combat fraud and other malicious activities that can weaken everyone’s play experience.”
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of restrictions on trial accounts for online games to combat spammers and gold farmers abusing them to annoy players. Those are often necessary and benefit legitimate gamers, but I’ve never seen a restriction this heavy on people who’ve paid for the full game. As it stands, we’ve received no satisfying explanation for why this is required. Blizzard needs to give a more detailed explanation of why they’re taking this extreme measure of keeping players from the game they’ve paid for.
We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment.
Somewhere
deep in Alliance space, a team of high level strategists are sitting
around a table coming up with names for new operations. There don’t seem
to be many hard rules behind each title, but if it can easily double as
a good name for a death metal band and/or a professional wrestler, it’s
in. We’ve had Goliath, Raptor, Resurgence and Excorcist so far, and the
trend is set to continue with the latest multiplayer weekend event, 
