Blizzard has been hard at work improving Battle.net’s capabilities, possibly in response to the popularity of platforms like Discord, and today it announced some cool new features for the Battle.net desktop app. Specifically, there’s a new Social tab that includes the new Blizzard Groups feature, which—as you’ve probably guessed already—allows you to talk to people who share common interests to better organize your gaming time. For instance, you can chat about new Hearthstone (Free) features and nerfs, upcoming events or releases, and so on. The chat now works even if you’re offline and includes the chat history, both features that will be synced with the recently released Blizzard Battle.net (Free) mobile app we wrote about a few weeks back.

The new Social tab includes another great feature that will help you ease new players into the game: Player Gifting. From now on, you can purchase and send in-game gifts to your friends, including packs, heroes, welcome bundles, pre-purchase bundles, and more. In other words, everything a starting player would ever need. And you can also use it to send gifts to friends just because. In celebration of these new features, Blizzard is offering a free Classic Pack to every player in the game, but you’ll have to go through the Battle.net desktop app to grab it (follow the instructions here). Overall, these are useful changes, especially given how Battle.net is now the home of Destiny 2 on PC, and I especially like the whole gifting part of it. What do you think of these new changes?