Beta to Retail Saves

Please be aware that with this large wave of invites we expect there could be an increase in the number of phishing attempts. Some unscrupulous individuals send out falsified emails purporting to be from Blizzard, but are in fact meant to steal your login credentials. For more information on how to identify these emails please refer to our Battle.net Security site. One easy way to ensure your invite is legit is to avoid clicking on links in any invite emails you receive, and instead log in to your Battle.net account and see if you have a Diablo III beta license attached. If there’s no license you can be sure the email you received was not from Blizzard.

If you didn’t receive an invite, never fear! We’re going to continue to give away beta invites, so be on the lookout for promotions, contests, and giveaways on our properties as well as at your favorite fansites. We’ll have more information about these global giveaways as well as regional betas in the coming weeks.

Congratulations to those of you who recently got into the beta! Please don’t forget to use the Beta Feedback and Beta Bug Report forums (and theTechnical Support forum if you run into trouble running the game), and for those who haven’t gotten in yet, we wish you the best of luck!

Here are some more recent updates regarding Blizzard comments regarding the recent beta wave. I’ve also added a youtube of Diablo 3 beta patch 11 in action.

More on Beta Wave
The recent beta invites were for North American players only as we’re still heavily interested in server performance, and inviting local, low-latency testers is important to achieve the results we need. While we absolutely want to continue to bring in players from around the globe, our intent is always going to be to do what best serves our testing requirements.
So while there may not be any beta invites in this wave for the EU, we will have more information in the following weeks about the global giveaways as well as for regional betas for you. Keep your eyes on the Diablo III front page and forums for this upcoming awesomeness! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Beta to Retail Saves
Beta characters and achievements will not carry over to the final game. When Diablo III launches it will be a clean slate for everyone.
If it helps, you can blame it on the Lord of Terror. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
If we make visible gameplay or UI changes, we’ll definitely note them. Same for notable bug fixes, too.

The difference with the last two patches, however, is that they’ve only really included fixes for crashes that are relatively minor or simply affect a small percent of the beta population. The fixes themselves are pretty technical (as are the crashes), so that’s why we made a more generic statement like the above.