the weirdest shit happened to me with this game. I installed on Friday, played for a little bit with a throwaway character, and then logged out. When I got on the next day, that throwaway character was completely gone, so I figured I hadn't saved and just made a new character and started playing with some friends. Got to level 17, and started having lag issues so I logged out. When I logged back in, my lvl 17 Monk was gone, and the throwaway character was back! All of my play time is gone too, and my friends list was completely wiped, wtf? I started a thread on the Tech Support forum and 4 other people said they had similar problems, hopefully they can fix it.
EDIT: nevermind, battlenet had me set to log into European servers for some reason, once I switched them back to the Americas my hero/friendslist/playtime was intact.