RealID the only "friending" mechanism?

#1 - Sept. 8, 2011, 7:42 a.m.

Just got into the beta (hooray!) and I'm a trifle concerned -- when poking around the interface, I was looking at the 'social' section and I noticed that there's no mechanism to add friends except via RealID.

This is obviously really problematic as RealID is persistent across Blizzard games and I don't particularly want, say, my private WoW alts to be visible to people with whom I'd like to play Diablo III. I thought WoW and Starcraft 2 struck a nice balance: RealID is there and available, but you can add non-realID friends if you want.

I'm really hoping that this will be the case in D3 as well, and it's just something that hasn't yet been implemented in the beta. If you have to use RealID to play with friends, that'll be a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

Zarhym

#7 - Sept. 9, 2011, 2:54 a.m.

You'll be able to add game friends without having to rely on Real ID, just as in World of Warcraft and StarCraft II. This system just isn't set up to work that way yet. :)

We're still working on determining how the system will identify players at the non-Real ID level. The Real ID friend system is pretty straight forward and works virtually the same across each game, whereas if you look at how character names/handles are identified in World of Warcraft vs. StarCraft II, it's quite a bit different. So for beta, we at least wanted to make sure players have Real ID functionality to play with friends, even though it's not yet hooked up to WoW and SC2 Real ID.