The original Diablo 2 had a simple solution for this: Open Battle.Net and Closed Battle.Net. On Open Battle.Net you could use your offline characters in online

The original Diablo 2 had a simple solution for this: Open Battle.Net and Closed Battle.Net. On Open Battle.Net you could use your offline characters in online play, meaning you would run into a lot of hackers, but you could also play together with your friends online (there was also a LAN option). Closed Battle.Net meant your character was stored on Blizzard's servers, which prevented the most blatant cheating. But starting with Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 (and arguably WoW) Blizzard decided they could make more money by shitting their games up with always online DRM.