Just some passing thoughts - You are immortal

I was quite busy in the last few days with Paintbomb, so I didn't really spend to much time on thinking about game related stuff.

But this morning, while I was reading Ocho's excellent post about how Diablo 3 blurs the line further between MMOs and single player games, I had a kind of a revelation: Why Blizzard insisted on introducing "Always On", or whatever the right term is. 

Quite possibly a lot of you have played with Diablo 2 - as I did. A lot of my friends played it too, and we knew a bug with which we could duplicate items. Now, imagine the same together with the auction house where you can sell and buy stuff even for real money..

I am pretty sure that one of the reasons to be always on is cheat prevention. When a game becomes (quasi) multiplayer, cheat prevention immediately raises to high priority. If there is also money involved, then it becomes the topmost priority of all. 

I'd guess that Blizzard either have strict remote control over the drop rates, or at least they register all drops and follow the lifecycle of the item. This prevents duplication bugs, and also allows Blizzard to easily identify cheaters. 

On a different note, when I've heard that there will be another beta weekend for TSW, I headed straight to the beta page to find out how to get a beta key. Since then, I was checking the sources frequently, and as soon as the keys appeared, I registered for them. 

But, unlike last time, the keys seem to be either randomly distributed, or at least delayed until tomorrow - which of course resulted me singing on for it at several places. 

Should it happen that I receive more than one, I'd like to give them away. Let me know in the comments if you are interested.

(Update: Forgot to say that the reason for applying for more keys is that I still have a kind of a good feeling about last weekend, and I'd definitely like to meddle some more. I've heard the same from others as well)