Will there be a character specific or Diablo III specific friendslist as well, or is BattleTag the only way to add friends in Diablo III?

There will only be two levels of friendships in Diablo III when the game launches: Real ID friends and BattleTag friends. Character-level friendships like you have in World of Warcraft won’t exist in Diablo III, so if you want to another player as a friend, you’ll need to add them as a BattleTag friend or a Real ID friend.

Lylirra, can we get some clarification on where character names show up vs. Battletag?

Sure thing! When Diablo III launches, your character name will be visible to you in a variety of locations including the character selection screen and game menu. For other players, your character’s name will only appear within your player profile, as hover text in the friends list, and when your character participates in quest dialog. In every other context, your BattleTag will be shown.

Also, just to clarify, your BattleTag identifier (the numbers appended to the end of your BattleTag nickname) will be visible in the “Add Friend” dialog and on a player’s profile page. But that’s it. When you’re just playing normally in a group, only your BattleTag nickname should display.

So Bashiok basically lied then?

No, but we did miscommunicate, and that’s our bad.

To help clear up that confusion, the current design is something we feel pretty confident in. Even after carefully reviewing all of your feedback and analyzing the pros and cons of the system, we found that BattleTags are a better way (overall) to personally identify individuals from game to game, even if they change characters.

It helps players build up street cred, or even the opposite type of experiences where you’d want to avoid another player entirely — something that would only be possible with an account-wide nickname. As a result, we felt that confusing BattleTags with character names in Diablo III was detrimental to those types of benefits.

We know that some of you may disagree with that approach, and that’s totally fine. We just encourage you to give BattleTags a chance when Diablo III releases so you can see how the system works in the actual game environment. You might find that you actually like it! Or, you might not, and we’d love to hear your feedback either way. 🙂