Global Friends List size increase

[agentx5]

Can we please have the global friends list limit increase?
What would it take to increase the max size of the global friends list?
 

Because for myself and a sizable number of people I know, we have to frequently look for somebody we have to remove -- not because we dislike them or anything -- but because we simply don't have any room to add new people we meet.  Often times for me, this means removing people who I've not seen in-game in awhile on Everlasting, which means when I visit Excelsior or Torchbearer or something I won't have those people to connect with and team up.  With so accounts and my knowledge of the server-side code being limited, I'm wondering how feasible this is. 

Sadly this was not added to Page4, but I would still like to have this added in a future patch...  It's something I have to do almost everytime somebody sends me a global friends list invite.  I know I can't be the only one...

Edited September 13, 2022 by agentx5
Update because this was not added to Page4

[DawL]

Agreed! If you have a lot of friends, it gets full way to fast. And especially with playing on more than one server. I play *mostly* on Everlasting but I do have friends on Excelsior that I play with, and a very close friend on Torchbearer that I play with, so I meet folks on all three. 

 

Just out of curiousity - I have never been able to count because the list "jumps" all the time as folks log off/on - what IS the current limit?

[Ravenwulfe]

Definitely agree with this.

[Tax E]

2 hours ago, DawL said:

Agreed! If you have a lot of friends, it gets full way to fast. And especially with playing on more than one server. I play *mostly* on Everlasting but I do have friends on Excelsior that I play with, and a very close friend on Torchbearer that I play with, so I meet folks on all three. 

 

Just out of curiousity - I have never been able to count because the list "jumps" all the time as folks log off/on - what IS the current limit?

 

Sort the list by Name, not online status and it won't jump like that. 200 is the limit as I have hit it and had to purge duplicate and triplicate accounts from friends to make room for new folks. I think 300 would be a nice increase but I think any higher and there could be issues with people disappearing from the list. It happened on live sometimes where people just disappeared from global lists.

[DawL]

9 hours ago, Tax E said:

 

Sort the list by Name, not online status and it won't jump like that. 200 is the limit as I have hit it and had to purge duplicate and triplicate accounts from friends to make room for new folks. I think 300 would be a nice increase but I think any higher and there could be issues with people disappearing from the list. It happened on live sometimes where people just disappeared from global lists.

I have to wonder - since it's a two-way, permission based "friendship" - if the disappearance is from someone accidentally or intentionally un-friending (maybe to make room on THEIR list). I have had this happen even here on HC, even with less than the limit.

 

[agentx5]

11 hours ago, Tax E said:

 

Sort the list by Name, not online status and it won't jump like that. 200 is the limit as I have hit it and had to purge duplicate and triplicate accounts from friends to make room for new folks. I think 300 would be a nice increase but I think any higher and there could be issues with people disappearing from the list. It happened on live sometimes where people just disappeared from global lists.

 

Hmm...

What you describe @Tax E sounds like a scalar array bug from a data type conversion(s), one that probably isn't necessary, not an actual limitation.  But I would have to know more about.  Considering how Cryptic Studios has been notorious for spaghetti code that does sloppy things like converting floating point numbers into strings and then into integers -- which results having things like object dift or numbers that don't quite seem correct on a combat log.  And not just in CoH, they do things like that in ALL their games.  And Cryptic isn't the only game studio with messy data structures, as many game dev studios suffer from high turnover. Heck even Microsoft seems to go through cycles on such things (good OS, buggy OS, repeat). In contrast, well designed code will be modular and the modules will follow a clear standard for interfacing with function calls, regardless of who the developer of the month is for that project.

 

I don't envy anyone the bug hunt to fix that, but such things are always fixable.  If Joker could fix all of Day-Z's memory leaks (often times from easily missed things like a Croatian 'A' not being the same as an US English 'A' in Unicode.  Same thing to our eyes as humans, but a computer they are entirety different letters/symbols). 

 

 

TL;DR

 

Honestly 300 isn't enough, but it'd buy some time and allow for more additions.  Bug fixing would be the main thing, so it could be a big number like characters (which HC has set to 1000 without any issues).  I'd think the global friends list database entries have got to be much smaller than any characters, or even bases for that matter (and we have probably close to 100k of those)

 

IMHO, it comes down to this:

 

An MMORPG is about community more so than a single-player RPG (i.e. Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, etc), and CoH has one of the best communities.  Low limits on the global friends list actually puts a cap on that social networking.  Not everyone is going to reach the cap, but we've gotten large enough on HC that many of us have to go through removing people to add other people.

 

*Shrug*

 

It would be a smart QoL thing for this community, worth the time to take a good look at the code and database designs at least.

[Oklahoman]

I'd like this, but also a column for "Last Online." That would make it a lot easier to purge when you do hit whatever limit there ends up being.

[DawL]

On 9/13/2022 at 7:04 PM, Oklahoman said:

I'd like this, but also a column for "Last Online." That would make it a lot easier to purge when you do hit whatever limit there ends up being.

That's an excellent point! 

[agentx5]

On 9/13/2022 at 7:04 PM, Oklahoman said:

I'd like this, but also a column for "Last Online." That would make it a lot easier to purge when you do hit whatever limit there ends up being.

 

That is also a great idea!