Social Interface: "Appear Offline" please.

Dear all,

making friends in an always-online game is a great experience. There are times, however, when you want to be alone and just mindlessly kill some mobs for an hour without feeling the need to explain to people why you don't want to join their party / chat / ...

This is why I would love an "appear offline" mode. All this mode would do is mask your status as offline, even though you are online and playing as normal. It might make sense to restrict talking privileges based on this, but that can also be left to the players to handle (if you decide to talk to friends even though you're appearing as offline... eh... power to you I guess).

The ability to switch between modes could be implemented by turning the "little green guy" icon to the left of your status message on the social panel into a drop-down field, e.g.: "Available", "Busy" or "AFK" (if those make sense as statuses, dunno), and "Offline", and could be mirrored by colouring the corresponding "little guy" icons in the social list accordingly, similar to how popular IM services deal with this. Or implement slash commands, e.g. /on, /off, /afk.

Why do I want this?

1. Privacy reasons. It should be my choice to be seen or not seen. I should not be forced to decide for or against friends in general to accomodate this wish.

2. I'll admit it's a personal issue as well. I'm suffering from a mental illness that sometimes severely limits my ability to perform in a social context. I would prefer to have an innocuous way to stay by myself during those times rather than risk offending or hurting people who I care about.

I support this idea - there are many time I feel like powerleveling a character and don't want to feel guilty because I won't help my buddy kill (insert boss du jour).

I just... dropped by the social window. Still no dropdown. =( What a drop-down!

Maybe a dev could drop in and drop a line about a patch dropping so we can get a dropdown?

bump

you realize that this is a request from 2013?

if not try /help in chat and check 'dnd' and 'afk' options