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+1
Originally Away and Busy were both implemented to be used when people are 'actively chatting' as an indication to use that you're not on keyboard or you're trying to watch something or something else. (for example: if you went to the toilet, you quickly switch to away, and put it back when you're ready to reply again.)
Personally, I don't like chat for the same reason I don't like phonecalls. The moment you sit down, people will expect you to IMMEDIATELY (I rarely use caps, but just to indicate the frustration) reply to whatever they say.
and since people can only actually tell if you are behind a keyboard when you launch a game, they indeed start to chat with you at the exact same time you're not open nor willing to chat with any of them and just want to play a video game.
Its sickening.
Let me demonstrate some of the messages I usually receive:
"Why are you not answering. Hello?"
"I see, after 15 minutes of waiting I assume you too now hate me. I suppose I should just kill myself."
And so, to avoid that I disabled "show people what games I am playing"
because they use me as some sort of therapist bag or whatever; at any rate it lowers my mood to do anything and the world is already depressed due to covid.
Seeing what other people do is fun and all, like "oh you're playing god of war, oh you're playing 100% orange juice, oh you're reading Steins;Gate, ..." you know,
but chat spam, popups, noise, distractions, I don't need any of that when I am clearly running a game.
Away and Busy are like "ignore buttons" for these 'attention' or 'compassion' seekers. They assume you don't want to chat with them, on which they are right, but they assume it for the wrong reasons, like that they shouldn't exist or something. They don't get how annoying they are.
You wonder what Away is for?
For that. You want peace and silence, just to relax and do things on your own pace, but you still wouldn't mind getting popups about group activities or to see what your friends are doing.
Busy is for turning all popups and sounds off.
this allows more time for yourself without someone trying to drain your mood. It allows you to focus on what you're doing, even if it is just thinking or whatever.
Online is when you're online, pretty open to most things most of the time.
that said, you're still forced into a chat window when someone starts spamming, instead of receiving a message: "X wants to chat with you, do you want to engage or read their messages right now?"
That would be a major improvement in my opinion. Just asking before you get the whole DM spam in the middle of your game (which by the way also steals your focus very often).
Edit:
Just saying, whatever your status is, you shouldn't be obligated or threatened or feel forced to reply immediately. Reply at your own pace. People don't get that.
The whole darkening, or fading as OP calls it that "Steam Friends and Chat" does to Friends in the Friendslist that have the 'away' or 'sleeping' status, is just for the fancy looks, it doesn't have much to do with trying to tell others that they won't reply or something. That said I agree with you that it fits the Busy status more, since people less likely want to reply in that mode.
Yes it becomes hard to see or read their things when they're darkened, I agree on that, but-- do you need to see much? Maybe the game they play and the username maybe, perhaps that should be more visible somehow; though keep in mind that Steam supports changing the UI/Skin. If you don't like it, you can try customizing Steam a bit.
Why offline people are clearly visible, idk. They could exchange this feature, to make offline very darkened and faded, and where busy people are just... grayed out.
Maybe put a green fancy bar striked through away status instead and make them slightly dimmed, not too much, and a red striked bar through busy? idk
there are a number of options considering 'looks' I guess.
but a written status is enough.
If its "away", its clear that you might or might not get a reply, but you can choose that person from all the "not offline" people without having to focus on a second fade level color that you barely can see.
Having written "away", and animated zzz ...... what kind of additional handholding someone needs to get vizualized that someone is not fully there, by fading? Really?
At most, there could be a status "faded" for you, if you like that. But fading everyone makes not a little bit sense.
I just looked at a group. Online and offline good visible, away people nearly not there. It looks disfunctional. Even 4 indicators that show away, and one of them fades the other 3 and everything else.
How absurd is that?
The new fade is nearly indistinguishable from Offline and with how I have my Friends List setup it is a huge eyesore to see the SLIGHTLY green vs Offline. It takes my eyes at least 5 seconds to adjust enough to that part of the screen to even discern if the other party is online or not. I don't understand why they even changed this specific aspect. It was fine before with the 50% green or whatever the color was.
I will say I don't agree at all with Elucidator's rant because honestly, it's mostly a gripe about people messaging that person and being annoying while doing it, even though all they have to do is not use the Friends List and they might be better off, or you know, pare off the 'friends' who abuse the chat with guilt trips and whinges.
In conclusion, this new idle/away fade is a step in the wrong direction if the goal is to improve the chat system. Color and color variation helps immensely with large lists. Taking the old good faded green and making it almost black/green or gray/green detracts from that entirely.
There is nothing else needed.
Your brain and eyes must switch to two layers as it is now, you can not read in one go bright names and nearly gone ones. Or easily find the faded names in the list.
In easy words: People who are away did not choose to be GONE.
But someone decided for everyone else away to be GONE and faded instead.
I've posted before when Steam Chat was first rewritten about the differences between the "ZZZ" and the Away statuses not working correctly as it was meant to be originally.
1.) The Away status should come on after 5 mins of inactivity with the mouse OR keyboard. The keyboard activity is no longer being used by the Away tracking... so you could very well be sitting there typing to a friend or even playing a keyboard only game for hours and not move the mouse and it'll set you as Away for the whole time.
2.) The "ZZZ" is for the Snooze status, which originally only came on when a user was Away for 2 hours. Now it just instantly comes on with the Away status after 5 mins. In my opinion you either have a Snooze status or you don't. In this case we have a non-working Snooze status just hanging around for years when I'm sure it's an easy fix to set the timer on it or to just remove the "ZZZ" altogether until they do fix it.
These have been my biggest complaints about the new Steam Chat so far, but this super dark color/fading is too much and that needs to be fixed asap.
On some of the old messenger programs you could set an "away" message so people could see why you were gone and it would auto respond for you. This wouldn't be a bad idea to me either.
Oh and to the guy up there who gets annoyed when people talk to him... That's what the "Invisible" status is for. You can play your game or watch your movie or whatever and nobody sees you as available. If Valve added the away message you could at least tell people "I'm busy but I'll get back to you eventually" and they wouldn't think you were ignoring them unless they're just drama llamas (in which case we're back to Invisible). At the very least, going "away" with the "Do not disturb" option should tell people that you have notifications turned off.