Battle.net is the platform that Blizzard uses to help players communicate in and out of games with friends. Following the recent re-establishment of the name "Battle.net" earlier this year, they quickly put out a mobile app for the popular chatting platform. Now, Source Code pulled by members of the website MMO-Champion could point to some awesome new features in the not so distant future.
New features for Battle.net
On the forum MMO-Champion, a post was created listing out different strings within the coding of Battle.net which revealed that they might be adding an "appear offline mode," as well as the ability to create groups.
If you pour through the text you come across lines like:
"group.warning.appearOffline - You are currently appearing offline."
or,
"group.group.create.header - Create Group"
What appears to be happening is that Blizzard is attempting to create a platform that will be very similar to the one that many people currently use, called Discord. With Discord, you can create groups and manage who has access to those groups. Another feature of Discord that looks like it will be copied by the Battle.net platform is the ability to create invitations where you can control how many times it is used, or how long the link stays active.
The newly found features have drawn mixed reviews by users. Some think that by Battle.net implementing this type of programming directly into the gaming platform it will eliminate the need for guilds among players.
However, it has been positive as well, with some people praising the fact that you can now appear offline. A feature that had been promised many years ago by Blizzard.
Included with the source code strings on the website were icons that appear to be for the group avatars. These are very similar to what you normally have as your Blizzard avatar.
These avatars come from a wide variety of games, from World of Warcraft to Overwatch.
When will it roll out?
The one thing that wasn't included on the website, however, was an estimated implementation date. As of now, these features could be created within the next six months, or it could be a year. There is no real way to know for sure the plan Blizzard has for these updates.
Some are hoping that with "Destiny 2" being released at the end of the month, more information regarding the platform may come out as well. However, like many other things regarding Blizzard, people are expecting it to be a long time before they will ever see this features on the platform.
