WoW,...now available offline

A spin-off discussion from Tobold's Blog re: Ubisoft's DRM which allegedly prevents you from playing Assassin's Creed 2 if you don't have an active internet connection.

What if you could play WoW offline, then when you went back online the server brought your server character into par with your locally stored character?

Now obviously there would be limitations to what you could do offline. Clearly you couldn't Raid while you were offline, or do BGs, or even Solo an Instance, and the Farming of Mats, etc, would also be off limits. Basically your character would be restricted to in-City activities only, again with a few exceptions such as no buying items from the Auction House.

But why couldn't you access your Bank? Or use any Mats you happen to have on-hand to craft some items, or level your First Aid or cooking skill? Maybe you could even do a spot of Fishing. Those are all activities that would be hard pressed to be considered game breaking if you could perform them while off-line, such as...Tuesday mornings, during maintenance.

Your Boss has given you the day off but it's Tuesday! The cunning bastard knows it's Patch Day, and he's still not happy he caught his daughter hitting on you at the office Christmas Party (and thank God that's all he caught her doing. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Saaaaay no more!) and normally you would be forced to spend your day doing something else, except now you can play offline. (And no, you can't. I'm just making this shit up.)

Now you can level Fishing like you'd always planned to, with no annoying /Trade chatter in the background to distract you.

And when the server comes back online your game detects this and there's a brief period of downtime (or however long it takes to download the patch, and upload & synch your offline and online characters) and now you're playing the online game.

Could it work? Would it work? Would it still be prone to people cheating?

We know people will cheat any chance they get, and having your character stored on your local PC instead of on a server in Irvine (or where ever they are) would only make things easier. Which is why the server side program would need to verify any changes between your offline character and online character, and any changes that seem unlikely or impossible would be erased. Epics do not come in Titanium Lockboxes, you know. And for that very reason, just like accessing the Auction House, the offline opening of Lockboxes or any other containers would also be verboten.

So, could WoW be played offline in a very limited capacity? And would Blizzard, or any MMO developer for that matter, be willing to implement some form of offline play in their game, for when their servers are down, or you just can't get online?