Diablo III offline play crack released in beta form

Blizzard decided the best way to protect Diablo III from piracy was to implement always-connected DRM through Battle.net. It has led to more than a few problems, thousands of angry gamers, and the threat of a few lawsuits.
While all that has been playing out over the past few weeks, renowned Chinese hacking group Skidrow has been working away on a crack. The online DRM Diablo III uses, works by constantly checking to see if a user is connected while running the game. So Skidrow has developed a server emulator that makes the game think it is connected to Battle.net when in fact the gamer is playing offline.
The crack is still a work in progress, but it does work in so far as allowing the game to load and run, and a beta version has been released as a torrent. It also looks like it includes a LAN play option suggesting you can still play with friends. However, because the game effectively runs online it is apparently devoid of much content at the moment. And in order for that content to be added, Skidrow would have to steal it from Blizzard’s servers and add it to their emulated server.
As Diablo III isn’t available in China yet, you can imagine how popular the crack is going to be even if it doesn’t do that much yet. With the issues gamers have been having around the world, it’s likely to spread very quickly.
So popular are Blizzard games in China, legitimate news website in the region are reporting the crack as a positive development. These include Tencent and the People’s Daily, who even ask users to be patient with the bugs they find in the crack.
For Blizzard, it will mean alarm bells ringing. Not having the game available to buy in China means thousands of gamers will revert to attempting to crack it. Even if it leads to nothing, it opens the way for viruses to start spreading as part of torrents claiming to be the offline crack, and it will confuse more than a few gamers eager to play the game at any cost.
All Blizzard can do is try and figure out how to stop the server emulation from working and updating clients with a patch. Other than that it should make sure it has bullet proof security protecting the Battle.net servers in case someone does try to steal the Diablo III gameplay content.