Diablo III Communication

I did some poking around to see what I could find out about methods of communication for Diablo III. Does it have voice chat? Does it have a buddy list? Does it have guilds? Chat channels? I know a fair number of people who are going to be playing Diablo III and it would be nice to know how I can get in touch with them.

First up, there are no guilds. Blizzard seems to acknowledge that guilds would be nice but they just couldn't fit them in for launch. This makes me sad.

As I understand it there are no user created chat channels. There are a handful of public chat rooms (trade chat with a million people sounds fantastic...) but no way to create your own. So it won't be as easy as having people join ogtmewmewpewpew.

It does have two different types of buddy lists. The first uses the Real ID system brought in with StarCraft II and retrofitted into World of Warcraft. You add buddies using their email address and then get to see everything about them when they're playing. Real name, what they're playing, their character name... All that stuff. If you want to add me as a Real ID buddy you should find some way to get in touch with me and we'll swap email addresses in a non-public forum.

The second uses a new battletag thing. It sounds almost the same as the Real ID system except you use a chosen pseudonym instead of your email address. It doesn't display your real name. My battletag is Ziggyny#1233.

It does not have voice chat. After playing World of Warcraft and League of Legends for so long with voice chat I can't imagine grouping up without some form of voice chat. I checked and I don't believe the old OGT Ventrilo server is operating anymore. (A good thing since we haven't been using it for a year or so!) Recently I've been using Skype since it's free and what other people seem to be using for LoL. It doesn't have nearly the functionality that Vent had but it gets the job done. My Skype name is baconshake19. (I made the account while playing Starfleet Commander and Baconshake was my user name in the extreme universe there.)