Blizzard's Appear Offline Mode Spotted in a Hearthstone Update
In today's Hearthstone patch, we've spotted a few new strings which indicate the appear offline functionality that players have been asking for from Blizzard may finally be on the horizon. This is further backed up by changes to game code to support the functionality.
The most recent acknowledgement of the feature from Blizzard was back in in November of 2016 when Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch's Game Director, stated they wanted to add the feature to the game and the company as a whole was in the process of figuring it out. You can see this post and the original appear offline announcement from 2012 below.
Quote from HearthPwn
- GLOBAL_FRIENDLIST_CHALLENGE_BUTTON_IM_APPEARING_OFFLINE You can't challenge {0} right now. You are set to appear offline.
- GLOBAL_CHAT_SENDER_OFFLINE You are currently offline.
- GLOBAL_CHAT_SENDER_APPEAR_OFFLINE You may not send chat messages while you are set to appear offline.
Jeff Kaplan on Appear Offline
Quote from Jeff KaplanWe would like to add an "Appear Offline" option to Overwatch. We are in the process of coordinating this with Battle.net and the other game teams. Because our social system is a cross-game system (WoW, Hearthstone, Heroes, SC2, D3) adding this functionality is not trivial for us. I know there has been discussion around this feature for a long time, and things have definitely not moved at a rate which is acceptable, I can assure you we care about the feature and want to figure out how to make it happen.
For your particular issue regarding invites, you can go into the Social Options menu and turn off invites.
Thanks for being patient with us.Thank you for this. I was wondering if/when this would be added.
I wish I had a definitive "when" to provide. Hopefully a decent first step is just knowing that we aren't opposed to the idea and want to embrace it.
Appear Offline Coming Soon Announcement (Sept 2012)
Quote from BlizzardIn the coming months, we're planning an update to Battle.net that will give you more control over your online presence when playing Blizzard games. Soon, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III players will be able to select "Appear Offline" as one of their Battle.net social-status options (along with Available, Busy, and Away) for those times when they want to wander Azeroth by their lonesome, dominate the galaxy in radio silence, or slay demons in solitude. When you choose this option as your status, all of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as “Offline” in their friends list whenever you’re logged into a game.
The “Appear Offline” status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game. For Diablo III, we expect to add the feature in a patch after 1.0.5. For World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, we expect to add the option sometime after the release of each game’s upcoming expansion.
Thanks for your continued feedback, and we’ll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead.
Chat would be more of a social meal - they just want a little flavor of it.
Well, there are many, many players who don't.
I know, and the rest of us will compose a song for our tiny violin orchestra for the burden you have to click two extra times. THE HUMANITY. :P
I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm saying it's an easy change that is very commonly requested.
But thanks for making my point about how the game does not need to be more social.
Aw, lighten up, man. If a little joke bothers you that much... boy, the Internet must be a cold hard place for you. Be well!
I can't believe Battle.net died for this, truly a noble sacrifice.
truly a noble sacrifice
So you might say that in order to improve the quality of life of the players, Battle.net had to... GET DOWN!
... Yeah. That's actually not funny. Sorry.
All hail Jeff from the overwatch team! The offline master or something.
Ben Brode cries in corner
After five years, it's finally coming. What the hell took so long for a feature that is piss easy to make?
If it took 5 years then maybe it wasn't so easy to do? Also as a side note, they've got plenty of other things that'd probably take priority over this, so it's not like they've focused the entire company on that for the entirety of five years.
Never underestimate spaghetti code. Appear offline may sound simple, but to actually implement it across all their games could have been quite challenging depending on how well set up for it they were.
It's all about the timeline lining up correctly for all their games, which only got harder as more titles were added to the roster.
I do think it's silly they made the initial statement back in 2012 which really promised the feature after a certain amount of time. I think they've now learned that's a REALLY bad idea.
To expand on this, WoW and the global user system of Battle.Net around it are old, and (especially with WoW) it's usually painfully obvious that older code has been left to die/atrophy rather than be incorporated into any new patterns like this. It's indicative when new features and improvements affect code in far-flung parts of the games that "should" be isolated, but obviously aren't.
That's not to say these systems are "bad" in any way, especially considering how much money they make. The codebase is simply monolithic, and any large feature like this has the potential to break all sorts of things that nobody considered because someone a decade ago wrote one weird line of code assuming something like this would "never happen" in the business logic. Not to mention that many of the proper design patterns for programs of this type and size DIDN'T REALLY EXIST when they were first written. WoW blazed the trail in a lot of ways, and while there's been a lot of cleanup there are still plenty of problems that come from being one of the first.
That has to be the smoothest repeating .gif I have ever seen! It;s quite mesmerizing.