This transpired on the forums when people complained about drops originally:
Complaint, Complaint, Complaint
People start saying the AH is controlling the drops of the good gear (limiting what you can roll for items)
Bashiok (Blizzard Rep) comes on the forums and actually says the AH does influence droprates or the economy would crash. (No I will not link this, google it)
Then he backtracks or some other Blue did shortly after that.
Now his comments are brought up in every complaint thread about drops.
On one hand you really hope rng is rng. On the other hand you have a Blizzard rep state this publicly then got his wrist slapped to retract it.
.
He never said that, although his words were misrepresented by many and used as "evidence" of that.
Blizzard clarifies it nicely:
"The auction house has absolutely no effect on drop rates. There are conspiracy theories and misunderstandings, but I do want to re-iterate: there is NO interaction whatsoever. Bashiok mentioned earlier that we took the AH into account, so let me expand a little bit on that.
The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development, we didn't have an Auction House, and we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60 internally before the game came out using only drops that I found -- we all did."
Bashiok's original statement:
"The auction house obviously provides an incredible service to allow for very easy trades between characters, and essentially blows out the wide range of items you could have available to you at any one time. So, in fact, the AH has to be a factor in how we drop items. On one hand you have a huge benefit because you can buy and sell items very easily, as opposed to having to post up WTS threads in the old USEast trading forums, but on the other end it does impact the item pool economy with the inherent ease at which you can trade items. If the AH existed but wasn't a factor at all into how items dropped/rolled, the economy would be completely tanked within a matter of weeks."
Clear as day he is talking about the design of the game. The rarity of legendary items, for example, was set to be rare enough that they would hold some value even with the existence of an auction house. Players who interpreted his words to mean blizzard actively manipulates drop rates in some ongoing way were reading words into it that he never wrote.
Furthermore, many players have logged item drops extensively to determine just how the drop rates and magic find work together, any direct manipulation by blizzard would have been detected long ago.
And finally, the idea that blizzard would spend money hiring people to observe and control rare items and disable or enable drops to keep the auction house values high is completely laughable to me, they have better things to do with their money.
Silly conspiracy theory is just a silly conspiracy theory.