In Overwatch you might soon be able to go offline – at least for your friends list.
Who doesn’t know that? You feel like playing a round, but just have no desire to deal with your friends. Occasionally, you just want to play something carefree and alone. However, the Battle.net software often puts a spanner in the works, because as soon as one of the games is started, all “BattleTag” friends can see immediately what you are up to.
While this is extremely helpful when you want to invite friends to a game of Overwatch or a raid in WoW , it is very annoying when you really don’t feel like it and just want some peace. It hasn’t helped much that you can now join your friends in voice chat on Battle.net with just one click. This happens so frequently, in fact, that you don’t even notice when a player joins the conversation.
In the official forum, some Overwatch players have now requested to be able to appear “Offline” on Battle.net to have some peace for a while. All other major launchers, such as Steam, offer such a feature as well, so Blizzard is under pressure. Jeff Kaplan quickly responded to these requests:
“We would like to integrate an ‘appear as Offline’ option for Overwatch. We are currently in the process of coordinating this with Battle.net and the teams of the other games. Because our social systems are cross-game (WoW, Hearthstone, HotS, StarCraft 2, Diablo 3), it’s not easy to add this functionality. I know that there has been a discussion about this topic for a long time, and things have definitely not moved as quickly as would be acceptable. I assure you that we are taking care of this feature and want to find out how we can make it a reality. (…)”
Thank you for your patience.”
Cortyn says: I’ve been wishing for such a feature for a long time, because sometimes I just want to play without dealing with all that “social drama” that might be lurking in the guild chat or friends list. I hope that this feature comes sooner rather than later – hopefully in the first half of 2017. That at least a reaction to this topic is coming is a good sign.
