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.
If you disconnect while in the game, does the game automatically go to offline mode (assuming you're not in a match but collection/lobby/practice) or will we need to restart the game?
Thats not what offline mode is.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooo how about Replays?
Sweet.
If you dont have any friends this has never been a problem.
Yes! This is what i have been waiting for since closed beta. I can appear offline now. Who gives a fuck about tournament mode, achievements, better cards, better free to play experience,etc... Appear offline mode is finally here and i will have so much fun with it. (for imbeciles who do not understand this is called sarcasm)
Here is a great tip which will help you a lot. This is not just for the internet, it applies in real life too:
If you have to explain the joke to your audience, then it's not a funny joke.
Gwent made blizzard to do good fixes and updates and to give us new,free stuffs :D hail gwent! :D
It's not the same type of game at all and it's highly unlikely that out of all the cardgames on the market they're upping their game in comparison to the 200k playerbase game that is Gwent. The people who "swapped over" from HS to Gwent just to be like big boy Lifecoach are the worst.
That's not even close to what I said.
Only 5 years.... seems fast to Blizzard...
Nax out yet?
Yet still no autosquelch. It cannot be that hard to implement autosquelch.
They don't implement autosquelch because they don't want to implement it, not because it's hard to implement.
It's literally 2 lines of code in the match initialization phase and a small addition to the options menu.
start practicing doing it right after mulligan phase every game, it becomes muscle memory after a while you don't even think about it, it becomes "squelching on curve"
Have they ever once expressed an intention to implement auto-squelch? I doubt they'll ever do it. Auto-squelch is simply not conducive to the social flavor they want the game to have.