When appearing offline in the Battle.net client, the user should, for all intent and purpose, appear completely offline.
In the friends list, and also within Overwatch itself, the "Offline for <amount of time>" should indicate the last time a user was logged into the client, whilst not appearing offline, i.e., with the status: Available, Idle, or Busy.
Currently, it resets that time when you log into the client, regardless of your current status. As if it doesn’t care, quickly makes you makes you akin to “available”, checks your current status, and then set it.
Now, to my understanding, the change in state is so quick that the colour icon indicating status doesn’t change; but the time does.
Some people prefer to appear offline, and have their reasons for it.
Currently the information can be used to infer that someone is currently online, or at the very least, online recently.
With that knowledge, you can also estimate the length of time that person has been online (whist they have indicated to appear offline).
As an example, my friend chose to Appear Offline.
He looks offline in Battle.net and in Overwatch.
However, I can see that his status jumped from “Offline for 20 hours” to “Offline for 1 minute”.
A separate time, I joined in, I can see him active on Discord and join in with our clan. His status indicated “Offline for 40 minutes”, therefore I now know he started playing 40 minutes prior; which was confirmed.
Now my friend doesn’t care too much about being offline, I do, and he’s doing it to poke fun at me in all good fun. However, he also found the information that is leaked because of this concerning.
It could be an unintentional bug or side effect of how the login systems work.
However, it should be addressed, as it is leaking information that the user has explicitly chosen to keep restricted, by manually choosing to “Appear Offline”.
![:smiley:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=5" ":smiley:")