Diablo® III

So am I to understand that in the corner of the game my battle tag will display? You know how confusing that is when you have more than one of the same class?

to everyone whining and complaining about something they have not yet even used: shut your dirty !@#$%-mouths.
they said it's a great idea, and we should trust them. they even said that AFTER you get to play around with it, they welcome your criticism, but at the moment, you're all just dodo birds telling hawks how to fly.

If they say "jump" you will jump?

Good luck to ya

how the balls is trusting the game developers with their decisions compared to following orders blindly?

Question (not sure if it was answered)

On a public game, when my character name will be displayed?

The D3 Beta was great and I cannot wait to play at launch (it's been a long 12 years), but the dev-team has admittedly focused so hard on gameplay that they have made many tradeoffs in the social aspects of D3.

Social features currently, and very bizarrely, missing after five years of development:

• BattleTag system is just weird. D3 character names ought to be more prominent. As so many have said, friends and I were on the Beta for hundreds of hours and none of us had any idea what each other's character names were. That doesn't bode well.

• The D3 chat system is bizarre. This has been beaten to death here. IncGamers did a really nice post on this a while back and I agree with it.

• D3 ought to have an in-game voice chat option like SC2 had from launch. (Jay Wilson said it wasn't up to their quality during D3 development but I think this should be a priority, although according to Jay it is not. Obviously the tech is there since SC2 has it and it works fine.)

• Character privacy toggle. I've made posts about this in the past and I still feel strongly that my builds, items and characters (along with how much time I've invested) should not be public knowledge UNLESS I want them to be. A simple checkbox toggle solves this.

• A bunch of other social features I'm forgetting right now but will probably remember later.

I used the BattleTag during beta and honestly the idea of having an account-wide name to identify you is flawed at this point. Nothing is stopping people from copying well known names over and over so no one is unique anymore. The only way to tell the differerence is to check/memorize each persons #0000 number. I'm guessing most people won't even bother checking the # when they're busy playing a game. They might see "NOOBZOR" enter the game and remember that someone with that name was griefing the other day and right off the bat they start insulting/arguing etc. Well that person could be NOOBZOR#1674 instead of the griefer who was NOOBZOR#1624. The name NOOBZOR is tainted and this guy will take a lot of crap for someone elses actions. A lot of people will jump the gun before checking #0000 identifiers. I can think of other scenerios where this name system could cause a lot of confusing and unneccesary arguments. I miss having truly UNIQUE names that didn't require additional information to be memorized.

Also, it completely sucks having a BattleTag that has a more masculine sounding name and then seeing it posted under your female DH's icon. What was so wrong with "Doragg (mrselfdestruct) has joined the game" and "Alsyla (mrselfdestruct) has joined the game" The fact that we can't create multiple accounts totally solved the multi problem for D2. This whole system is a step backwards IMO. Just a few thoughts I had about it. Not about to cancel my preorder because of this but it is something I'm not happy about at this point.

I would MUCH prefer having a character name listed in the party list than the battletag. I'll give it a shot, but am rather disappointed that the Battletag system is the dominant way to handle identity in the game.

05/08/2012 11:50 AMPosted by Lylirra

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 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 only be visible in the "Add Friend" dialog and on a player's profile page. 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. :)

Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

05/08/2012 01:06 PMPosted by Evo

i, too, played the beta just like all of you, but you should be well aware that the beta will differ from the game. also, why do you have to complain about such an insignificant thing?

If they're complaining, then I don't think it's insignificant to them. Your mileage may vary.

First, Bashiok and Lylirra, thank you for your responses and well thought out answers.

Second, many of the complaints in this thread have been focused on WoW with the rhetorical question, "Why are you doing this to D3 if you are not willing to do it to WoW?" This question fails to acknowledge the many problems that players are currently suffering from in creating new names in WoW. A friend of mine recently got so desperate after trying all of his favorite names that he literally clicked the generate random name button 10 times and all of them were taken. He finally resorted to a practice which he and many others find troublesome; he used special characters in his name. I personally would much rather be allowed to get my favorite name - every time - instead of having to deal with ridiculous, abstract, and convoluted names. Not to mention the fact that D3 is running, effectively, on a global server. Have any of you considered what would happen to people who bought the game 6 months after release? Do you really think there would be any names left to be used?

Third, several other complaints have been based around the issue of not seeing one's character name frequently enough. If you want to be known and represented by a certain name, then why not make that name your Battletag? If you are trying to roleplay a certain character and name combo, well, conveniently, the in-game dialogues will use that name for you so that you can have your RP experience. If you are trying to RP with *other* people then you are, frankly, playing the wrong game. There are far better platforms for roleplaying than this one. Perhaps there is another reason why people want to see their name all the time but *don't* want it to be their battletag; I personally cannot see any ones that make sense.

Fourth, thanks again Bashiok and Lylirra for your feedback and information. I personally think that this system is an intelligent evolution of previous practices. Moves like this show me that all of you at Blizzard continue to learn and adapt based on the things that work best for both you as producers and us as gamers.

You are wrong

There can be 1000000 'Shaden's for example

Shaden1567
Shaden2934
Shaden1983

etc etc ...

Only the Alpha part of the name is shown. Read the blue post more closely.

This^^^. i don't have any street credit if lets say

RoastBeef#1343 = this is me I'm a good player and nice to everyone who is nice to me and i give everyone a fair chance until they prove otherwise

RoastBeef#3607 = this is someone who constantly joins games to trash talk and annoy people. he is not me

RoastBeef#0666 = this guy is a hardcore griefer he joins your inferno games and bails when your in a situation that will get you killed and has been known to kill off hardcore characters this way. he is not me

RoastBeef#5561 = he is passive and rarely join many public games or have much interaction with other players, he likes to enjoy his games alone and loves that he has the option to do so AND trade in the gold based auction house without having to make friends with people to know he can trust them. this is not me

RoastBeef#2350 = She is an avid pvp er and has a rep for being a badda$$ in the ring and and has an honorable attitude about it and everyone wants to both fight with her and beat the crap out of her as is the persona she gives off. she is not me.

RoastBeef#0130 = this is secretly a blizz employee and dont want to be known as such. he wants to enjoy the game and not be bothered with questions on policy and game mechanics. this is not me.

Sometimes I like to have a few different personalities in game that I want to keep separate from each other without everyone knowing who I am on any specific character.

As far as the street cred goes it is not relly there unless I want to wright down the # of every single roastbeef out there and keep track of what there in game personality is.

Yes it is hard to stay away from the bad reputation if someone can just view all your toons (go for it. flame me, I said toon, twice now.) by looking at your profile that is attached to everything. It is however a game and I think the cons outweigh the pros like a starving Ethiopian child vs a sumo wrestler. We should have the freedom to roll play "Action roll playing game" without having to buy 6 copies of the game and have 6 different b.net accounts to keep track of.

Names are basically only useful for sorting your characters.

No reason to name them anything other than MaleMonk, FemaleWiz, MaleBarb, etc.

And of course because there will never be a difference between my character and your character there is no need for more than 10 spots as their is only 10 possible characters that can be created. Pretty bland I guess.

05/08/2012 01:21 PMPosted by Maynard

So am I to understand that in the corner of the game my battle tag will display? You know how confusing that is when you have more than one of the same class?

You will get to see the characters name; other people in the game won't. Names are like a filing system.

This is just beyond dumb.
So not surprizing at all.

It seems Blizzard went the Starcraft route of name identifiers over the traditional MMORPG path. You might as well name your player Zerg or Protoss or better yet, Barbarian or whichever class you are playing.

I am thankful I still have my Battletag ID to reset as I am going to go test character max and create the longest run-on word possible in order to attempt to have some sort of unique or rarely used name. <----- yes this is a run on sentence

And I had so many cool names I wanted to use and display...

This is a horrible idea. Battletag should be used for nothing besides adding people to your friends list. In game you should ONLY see the character's name and that's it.

This is a horrible fail and I am very disappointed.

I also think this is a terrible idea on multiple levels.

Immersion? Character identity?

Who thought of this tragic policy?