Sorry if this has been posted about recently. I and a few others have brought it up a few times before but those posts seem to get lost amidst the board reorgs and suggestion floods.
Simply put, invisible status does not work.
1. Players cannot log on invisible, alerting friends or followers of their presence, defeating the purpose of invisible mode.
2. Player activity is still revealed to others in a number of ways, even while invisible and when playing characters not in that guild:
a. Location updates on friends list or guild roster
b. Player name changes/updates on friends list and some guild window functions
c. Forgetting to leave a party before going “invisible” reveals activity via the party info system.
3. A number of other things, probably. I believe name order in the guild roster is also affected even when people are invisible.
Frankly, invisible mode is useless. Why is it important to some of us? For those of us that care about this very much, it’s a tool for us to separate our real lives from our leisure life. The two will inevitably meld together to some degree in GW2, but we need the ability to control our own experience.
Some people might respond by saying that I need to just talk to my friends or guildmates, but social relationships aren’t always that cut-and-dry. There are times it might not be favorable to say “I don’t want to play with you now,” or “I know the guild could use a fourth but I’d rather not play with you folks now.”
I see the root of the problem being the GW1 system where guild membership was account-based. GW2 is a different game with a different audience — I personally think GW1 is rather bad despite buying all expansions, and GW2 is quite ingenious — so it doesn’t make sense to adopt the same system just because nobody might’ve complained about it before. Why can’t I play an alt without having to worry about any obligations that are tied to another character?
Why not just adopt a per-character privacy (and this is very much a privacy issue) system? And if nothing else, why even have this function in game if it doesn’t work properly?
Personal anecdote: I’ve even gone so far as to remove real life friends from my friends list at the risk of slightly estranging them in order to better protect my online activity. Because some of my activity is still revealed, sometimes I choose not to play. And if I get disconnected or the server goes down while I’m playing invisible? Well, I suppose I’m then done for the day.
I’m sure only a minority of players care about this as much as I do, but for us it is a pretty severe quality of experience issue. I’ll be happy to further explain or make an analogy if needed.