I have friends I play GTA4 with.
I have friends I play CoD4 with.
I have friends I play Rock Band with.
I do not have room for all of those friends on my friends list.
Fortunately I have solved the whole problem for Microsoft. Now all they need to do is execute.
MS currently limits the number of friends that you can have on your list to 100. While that sounds like a lot, when you divide it by the number of different games that I play I’m allowed about 5 friends per game. I am sure at the begninning they needed to limit it to SOMETHING, and that at that time 100 friends seemed like an awful lot of people. But when you look at the massive attachment rate for the Xbox 360 (approx 4.6 games per console not counting arcade titles) it’s no wonder even the most reclusive gamers are having to be very choosie about who they allow onto their friends list.
Couple that with a preference to play with only people you know and it gets even more annoying. rather than jump into a room full of random racists on XBL, I much prefer to play with my peeps. To do this on CoD4, for example, I need nearly 20% of my current friends list to be online in order to play a full game.
1 in 5 of my friends needs to be:
- Awake
- Logged in
- Not busy playing something else.
Sure I am in a bit of a unique position with Sarcastic Gamer and all. I get far more Friend Requests than I did before the site started to grow the way it has, but I have heard this lament from lots of folks who aren’t involved with a website.
I used to prune my friends list based on the number of days since a person had been online. If it had been more than a month since they signed in, it was an easy “delete.”
But now, having employed that strategy for some time, I’m left with this elite group of 100 gamers who have all been on within the last 2 days. It’s ridiculous.
100 friends is just not enough.
I think they could go about fixing this in a couple of different ways.
The most obvious is to expand our friends lists to about 250. This would give even the most active gamer some room to grow for a good while. When they finally do hit that cap, chances are there will be plenty of people you can nuke based on unfamiliarity.
But there’s another option that I think might be an even bigger hit for all of us. An idea I thought of today while browsing the SGC.
Social Groups.
Imagine being able to start and maintain a social group on XBL. Essentially groups of gamers with common interests. Different than a friends list, this would be a pool of gamers that you could easily draw from for games. There could be forums tied to them on XBOX.com. The social groups could have moderators and leadership.
Hell, we could have a Sarcastic Gamer group to make inviting members into Gamer Night matches SO much easier.
I think the idea of being able to have an SG Social Group is 10 times more appealing than an expanded friends list. To keep players in enormous social groups from being bombarded with game invites, the host of a game could instead invite the group as a whole, making that match a join option when browsing and joinable without having the little green notification pop up a thousand times. If you’re looking for an online event and belong to the social group, you would just look for and join that game.
Whatever they do, I wish they’d do it soon. Right now I’m stuck in this weird position where people think I’m being a snob for not accepting a friend request, or mad at them because I took them off.
It’s madness I tell you. Madness.
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14 responses so far ↓
1 Sean "Rothbart" Workman // May 21, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Try the 50-friend limit on the PS3!
I understand that expanding the limit still places a limit on the list, and when they work it out for the entire customer base 50 (or 100 in the 360’s case) is a lot more than the “average” gamer uses, why punish the folks that really use their system and promote the online features? Especially in the 360’s case, isn’t that part of what we’re frickin’ paying for?
2 MightyMutt // May 21, 2008 at 5:14 pm
“The most obvious is to expand our friends lists to about 250″
I believe I’m right in saying that they have already said that the 100 limit is due to technical difficulties of going over 100 - Although I have no idea why.
You can already get round you problem though Doc. Create a silver account say ‘DOCCOD4′ and then invite all your call of duty friends to be friends with this gamertag. Then all you have to do is have you new DOCCOD4 gamertag on your original friends list. Using the friends of friends facility you can look at all the people on that list.
Its not ideal but it gets round the problem slightly.
3 ajnokia // May 21, 2008 at 5:16 pm
You should feel lucky, we only get 50 on the PS3.
But I honestly really do like your social groups idea. That could work really well.
4 ysbutycase // May 21, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I think you’ll find the limit is caused by the original xbox games being hard coded to accept 100 friends max. Increasing the limit for the 360 would break live play on the original xbox
5 darkwonders // May 21, 2008 at 5:46 pm
@ysbutycase So? Microsoft already killed their original Xbox the day the 360 came out… Do they even make Xboxes anymore?
6 ajnokia // May 21, 2008 at 5:49 pm
@darkwonders
No they don’t make Xboxes anymore nor do they release games for them
7 paulmess7 // May 21, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Great idea Doc but your not fooling anyone, you don’t have friends
Just teasing… That is a great idea, and I know 90% of my friends in real life…so it’s hard to delete people…
Ha, I was in the process of deleting someone today, and they logged in… I was kinda afraid it might say something like paulmess7 has logged out which could lead to a nasty PM… so I left him, that lucky SOB
8 tim // May 21, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Your losing a subsriber.
Fix the podcast rss feed.
9 SarcasticSparki // May 21, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Granted it’s not the easiest of solutions… but, I’d suggest using the Friend of Friend feature.
Create unused silver accounts per social grouping, and have only your RL friends on your friend list. This way if you want to see who of your SGC, RockBand or COD/FPS friends are online, you check your FPS_SGC_Doc’s Friends.
It’s not as pretty as a new buddy list feature, but it’s available.
10 Erock // May 21, 2008 at 7:15 pm
hrmm… the social group thing sounds an awful lot like xfire.
Surprised it never crossed my mind before, but xfire on xbox would be a match made in heaven!
11 sneak567 // May 21, 2008 at 10:07 pm
@ Erock
i aggree with u fully
12 Sven // May 21, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Dude, I love the idea. I could be in the Gamercast network social group and the gameplay network group, and I could always have a friend of a friend to play with.
13 footnmouthtard // May 21, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I think i am in the vocal minority of gamers. I play alot, but i don’t play online enough to have a bunch of friends, out of the ones i do have i only play with ten of them.
It would be nice if I could say put these 5 friends as Orange Box these as COD and so on.
14 Odins Messenger // May 22, 2008 at 9:47 am
I agree with the idea of social groups; hell I agreeed with it back when Penny Arcade suggested Community tabs. It’s a great idea and I do hope someday they implement the idea.
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