Hearthpwn

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 Kaplan

We 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 Blizzard

In 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.