New Feature Suggestion: Friends Lists and Automatic Companies

[Alexander SquidLord Williams]

As the number of folks playing increases (as we're all sure will happen ) and folks start finding the folks they like playing against, it'd sure be nice to have a way to automatically be joined to a game on the same side as the other folks you like playing with.

In fact, there are folks that, for various reasons, you like playing against, because they use interesting tactics or just because they're fun opponents.

Because all the logins are required to be registered with the server, there's no question of a given login name being associated with some other individual, which makes the following possible to do.

I, thus, suggest, knowing full well that its not likely to happen anytime soon, the ability to create two lists in game.

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• Company: Or pick some other appropriate organizational name for the setting's military. Basically folks you like to play on the same side as and whom you know, in some sense.</font>
• OpFor: Folks you like playing against, because you just like blowing them up, you have some in-game rivalry, etc.</font>

The idea being that when you join a game, the system automatically assigns you to the side which has more of your Company against more of your OpFor. Since it just tries to sort things out relatively neatly, if your Company-mates have different OpFor than you, you can be put against them by default and if you have multiple Company on the same side as an OpFor, you'll probably be there, too.

This probably has to go along with the ability to see the player list and choose your side before being dumped to the tac map. You could then override the default for whatever reason, etc.

I suggest this because I was just thinking of player-organized semi-regular playing groups who probably want to always be assigned to the same side, together. This would significantly suppliment their ability to do so. The OpFor idea came to me as I realized I was enjoying blowing up the same guy, repeatedly, so much so that I was going out of my way to preferentially target him during a game.

Ultimately, we could move some of this to an actual formal "group" registration system hosted on whatever server Clay plans to host the stats from ongoing battles on the "official" servers. Then Companies could have their own badges and symbols that appear on their specific stat pages and could designate other Companies as Friends or OpFor.

Just a thought. None of this can go in easily beyond the very basic Company / Opfor individual list, and that's not really useful until we get the pre-connect side-selection option.

[Chilibird]

Sounds kinda like an in game clan system to me. None the less, I like it. I don't know how easilly the game can have you on the same team as your buds, for balance reasons, but at least knowing that your friends are online would be good. And as the game grows, more than one server may come online, so you can tell which server they are on.

[Alexander SquidLord Williams]

I don't know how easilly the game can have you on the same team as your buds, for balance reasons, but at least knowing that your friends are online would be good.

If more scenarios / servers are set with the "humans replace bots" switch on, it should be no big deal. Currently, we have about 6 bots per side. With that on, as a human drops in, a bot drops out of control. Thus, there's kind of a moving buffer, and things stay ballanced, regardless.