* The big news is that the Beta Opt In rules have suddenly been changed. Previously, it was anyone who owned an Active Battle.net account which required any Blizzard game. Now, it's only anyone with an active World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2 account.

So, for those veteran accounts who have been playing Diablo 2 for 10 years.. they have no chance of getting into the Diablo 3 beta. Starcraft 2 players do, though.

The claim was later refuted, reconfirmed, refuted, reconfirmed, and then refuted again. These were all done by CMs or GMs.. so who really knows what internal rules are really being followed.

I've been told that there are other unofficial rules too.. like unsupported video cards won't make the beta, certain system specs, and "flagged accounts".

What's really interesting about this sudden change in the beta rules, is that it comes 1 week after I wrote about this exact same strategy. I've always known that the blog was monitored by Blizzard, and thankfully Daeity had hooked me up with some tools to track that sort of thing. There's a Blizzard system, for example, that has been "pinging" the blog twice a day at pre programmed intervals for quite a while now. It "watches" front page and new posts only. Just a very strange coincidence that after that blogspot about B.Net accounts, they changed the rules exactly for that situation. :)

* If you're interested in a Diablo 3 Beta "Offline Crack", there's a server emulator in the works. You can get all the information you want here. It's very early stages and something marginally playable is still several weeks away.

* More news from Rockstar, as expected. The release date for Max Payne 3 has been announced.. once that's out of the way, should free up some room for a RDR PC port announcement.

* Blizzard announced 6 games within the next 3 years at the recent Citigroup conference. These games are: Diablo 3, D3 X1, SC2 X2, SC2, X3, WOW X4, and WOW X5. This is all very very old news though and practically everyone already knew all about this. Not sure why this was suddenly "news" on so many gaming sites.

* I was going to add a bunch of stuff about illegal online gambling in this post, but it got so huge that I had to create a brand new post for it. I'll put it up later when it's done.

* I was thinking about writing an article on the "New" Diablo 3 Blackmarket that will emerge. You know, potential changes to the blackmarket now that Blizzard is running their own ingame Cash Auction House.

For example; because RMAH will not be available to Hardcore players, that's one market where items will be available. Because of the rarity and risk involved for farmers, the value of items will be substantially more expensive than Blizzard's RMAH. The size of the Hardcore community is a factor at play here too.

Third party websites will also sell the cheaper items (but in larger volume) with no listing fees. The big seller here won't necessarily be high end gear, but probably items or mats instead.

But, what other kind of stuff? Maybe Hardcore character sales? Maybe even the same stuff sold on the RMAH, but without the listing fee. It all depends on the listing fee, but I'll be pretty disappointed if it's more than $0.20 per item.

I really like the new RMAH, mostly because it's new and different for such a popular franchise, and it creates new forms of competition and tactics in the industry. I'm looking forwards to seeing how the market will evolve, and how Blizzard will combat competitors.