The Pros and Cons of Being Invisible

Coming “soon” to your Blizzard gaming experience – the ability to Appear Offline. Right now, your Battle.net social status has three options for you to choose from: Available, Busy, and Away. The Away status reverts back to Available as soon as you move. Busy shows your friends that you are doing something in game that requires your complete attention, and that you don’t want to be bothered. They can still talk to you, though.

The Appear Offline status will allow you to play WoW, (or Diablo III, or Starcraft II), without letting your Battle.net friends, or your Real ID friends, know that you have logged in. In some ways, this is like being invisible.

Your friends cannot see that you are playing and they cannot start talking to you through Battle.net or Real ID. To them, it looks like you are Offline. Nothing to see here but some shrubbery. Like a Rogue in Stealth, no one will see you unless you decide to make your presence known.

I am writing this blog shortly after logging into WoW to see if the Appear Offline feature had been added. It has not. Blizzard wrote a blog about this new option on September 20, 2012, that gave vague information about when it would be added. It says:

“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 games upcoming expansion.”

We all know that Mists of Pandaria has been released. I’ve no idea when the Starcraft II expansion will be released. In any case, we can conclude that the Appear Offline option will be available “soon”. I can see both positive and negative aspects to using it.

Pros of Appear Offline
* Got drama in your guild? Appear Offline will help you avoid it.

* It’s a good way to get some “me time” in game, without interruption

* Easy way to avoid talking to that friend who you don’t want to be friends with right now

Cons of Appear Offline
* It doesn’t make your character invisible. This could lead to an awkward conversation happening somewhere in Pandaria when you Appear Offline and yet, are standing right over there.

* Removes you from the social aspects of the game. You got in a guild to have people to play with. You selected an RP realm so you could interact in character with other players who want to do the same. You cannot do that and Appear Offline.

* Your friends may question how you managed to level if you weren’t online. Oh, you were online, but you Appeared Offline? This could lead to trust issues, (and that is never a good thing for a guild).