No not the mage skill but rather the ability to "Appear Off-Line" in Battle.net. Awesome stuff Blizzard but why has it taken this long?

Anyway rather than regurgitate Blizzards words, I'll simply quote the text:
In the coming months, we're planning an update to Battle.net that will give you more control over your online presence when playing Blizzard games. Soon, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III players will be able to select "Appear Offline" as one of their Battle.net social-status options (along with Available, Busy, and Away) for those times when they want to wander Azeroth by their lonesome, dominate the galaxy in radio silence, or slay demons in solitude. When you choose this option as your status, all of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as “Offline” in their friends list whenever you’re logged into a game.
The “Appear Offline” status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game. 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 game’s upcoming expansion.
Thanks for your continued feedback, and we’ll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead.

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© Mitchel Scanlon, book cover of Call to Arms (click here to buy)

A lot of fuss has been made this past week with blizzards announcement of the Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms. The trolls and haters have /cried and /whined along with those that may have genuine concerns over the system.

Lets examine what we have right now. Huge focus on guild play has made people run dungeons with their guildmates instead of using the Looking for Dungeon (LFD) tool. Invariably this means with tanks and healers and with people you trust to ensure a smooth run. This means that the queue times go up for players choosing to play a DPS role. To make matters worse, Blizzard made healing and tanking harder meaning that some players stopped tanking and healing at the beginning of Cataclysm (remeber Duane Hates Cata?) and those players didn't stop playing and tell Blizzard in their "I quit because" survey "man you guys made tanking and healing too hard lolz, I quit" they respecced or rerolled  DPS, further increasing the LFD queues for DPS.

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I am loving the RealID system. It allows me to to stay in touch with the people I have become friends with online regardless of where they are in WoW. However, the reign of it being the best thing in WoW since the Dungeon Finder  is about to come to a very abrupt end after a very short time.

With the announcement (source) yesterday, that in future forum posts on Blizzard sites will display our full name rather than that of our on screen alter ego, Blizzard seem to have taken the golden egg, covered it in grease and thrown it to Robert Green.

I personally don't want everyone I may encounter to be able to Google me and see what my thoughts on a video game are, sure some people I couldn't careless about them knowing but the guy that in 10 years will want to hire me as a big shot in his multi-million pound enterprise certainly doesn't need access to such ramblings. Therefore, I am now forced into a corner about posting on the forums either I keep quiet and preserve my anonymity or I have my say and risk the whole world finding out my views. Sadly, I'll be choosing the keep quiet option, at least on the Blizzard forums.

Anyways my piece has been said, feel free to post comments below as I'd like to know if I'm being over sensitive or not. more »