Appear offline on battle.net - feature long awaited by botters?

[HI5]

Have you ever thought "darn, my friends keeps bugging me while I'm bottling, but If I change my status to DND other players can notice what I'm doing"? Well... You probably won't have to worry about that anymore!
Blizzard has just announced new feature named "Appear Offline", which haven't been fully described yet (Blizzard will share more details in upcoming months), but the name of this feature pretty much speaks for itself.

What we know for sure at this moment is that "Appear Offline" function will allow you to... well - appear offline (to your battle.net friends) and will work across World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Starcraft II.

The difference between this feature and regular "do not disturb" is crucial, because if you set your status to DND you automatically look suspicious to other players cause of the tag next to your name (DND), while Appear Offline function will likely only affect how your real I.D. / battle.tag friends can see you on their friends list.

The only question is: what does this sentence means: "We’ll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead" - perhaps Blizzard is aware of the advantage that botters can take of this feature and want to implement some security system? Or perhaps they don't care that much about the botters and just want to test this feature before releasing?

What is your opinion, do you think this feature will be useful for botters, or maybe blizzard will do something to prevent abusing this function?
Make sure to let us know what You think in a comment!


Original new here:
“Appear Offline” Option Coming Soon to Battle.net - Diablo III

[Rayz]

Lol did you really just read this thread and my reply in WoW General and make a news post out of it?

Good thread nonetheless. It will get much more publicity here.

[HI5]

Lol did you really just read this thread and my reply in WoW General and make a news post out of it?

Good thread nonetheless. It will get much more publicity here.

I haven't, tbh I've start writing it right after I've noticed news on facebook, it just takes me some time (English is not my first language)
its pretty obvious to think about that first (especially if you're running powerlvling service )
It's an article btw, not a thread.

[Rayz]

M'kay. It was just weird seeing this in one section and then seeing it here an hour later. Hopefully this feature will come out shortly after the expansion.

[HI5]

M'kay. It was just weird seeing this in one section and then seeing it here an hour later. Hopefully this feature will come out shortly after the expansion.

I hear ya
I'd gladly give you some rep for heads up, but I already gave you some yesterday so I won't be able to do it for a while

[Teryaki]

Very interesting. Kinda been waiting for this myself, it will make for some good exploration videos without being interrupted by friends and family

[Ziggeh]

What is your opinion, do you think this feature will be useful for botters

Yes, but no. Yes, it will be useful if you don't want to be bothered by your real ID friends while you're botting, but no:
1) You shouldn't bot on your main account without supervision, period.
2) You shouldn't have real ID/battletag friends on your botting accounts, unless you need to and those people know that you're botting.
Unless you run a 24x7 farmer on your main account (which is an incredibly stupid thing) and have people who could rat you out (having such people on your friend list is an incredibly stupid thing as well), this is hardly useful. People who treat their real ID friend list the way prepubescent girls treat their facebook will be all over it, of course.

or maybe blizzard will do something to prevent abusing this function?

No. How? Why? If they really wanted to get rid of bots, they'd do that by now. I refuse to believe that they are incapable of doing that. What I do believe is that they'd lose over a million subscribers in one go if they'd ban everyone who uses bots. Do note how extremely vigilant and effective they are against D3 bots, and guess why - they do not care about D3 player numbers. Sure, there will be expansions people will have to pay for, but not any soon (and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd go easy on bots prior to expansion releases) and right now they're making more money off busted botters who have to buy more accounts to continue their business.

In short, I don't see this thing as beneficial for botters. The way I see it, it's a IM-like feature that allows people with "I add everyone on my friend list, even the people I don't like" mindset to be what they are - dicks. (Yes, this is overgeneralized. Yes, there are things this may be actually good for. But in general, people who are using invisible mode on IMs are dicks, period)