Instant messaging and social apps have long offered users the option of appearing offline or going invisible. This comes in handy if there are people that you don’t want to talk to. Oddly enough Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher never had that option, instead only allowing users to choose to be Online, Away, or Busy.The good news is that this is something that Blizzard is finally considering doing. According to a post on the Overwatch forums, the game’s director Jeff Kaplan wrote (via Diabloii.net), “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.”
This feature has been a long time coming, although many gamers have expressed their outrage that it only took Overwatch for Blizzard to start looking into it, despite it being a feature that many gamers have been asking for over 6 years. This is something that Kaplan has acknowledged in his post as well.
“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.” No word on when it will roll out, but better late than never, right?
Filed in . Read more about Blizzard.