To the left, you will see a screen shot of the current friends list as it stands on one of our accounts. We have added the green box to denote that everyone inside it are the SAME wizard. This brings up the main issue with the friends interface as it currently stands.When we have such a limited friends list, you have to choose between having all of your good friends in the list multiple times, or just missing them when they are on another wizard. Why should we have to take up such a large portion of our lists like this? It hurts!
We do now have the ability to add them without porting to their locations, so that helped. At least now we don't have to spend tons of time changing realms, then waiting to change areas, to get our wizards into the same location. The Spiral Free Press gives that update five wands.
So after some deliberation about how this can be solved, we put our heads together and came up with the following. This is the best way we have devised to handle the multiple wizards for the same friend.
We had our graphical wizard twirl their wands to create the sample of what we are talking about to the right.Here are our thoughts on how this interface improvement would work:
When you add a friend, that friend only takes up ONE spot in your friends list, but ALL of their current or future wizards on that account are automatically added.
When you move your wand over that friend, then a small window showing all of their wizards could pop out to the left of the friends name.
To deal with knowing when the friend is online, you can use color. In the example, we have used green to denote that our friend Ian Spiritflame is online, but he is on a different wizard. The pop out shows us that he is currently bringing order back to the Spiral on Ian Sunflame.
We would like to see our friends list globalized across all of our wizards. Then when we create new wizards, our friends are already intact, and we don't have to spend a ton of time trying to relocate them. Better yet, let us have a way in the Parental Controls to denote which wizards share lists. We know some parents share a single account with their children, or some siblings have to share accounts. This way, you can keep each family members lists global, but still unique to the player.
We think an improvement like this to the friends system would be a welcome change, and turn the issues of limited list size and managing friends into a much easier task. A task that is no longer a source of nightmares, but lets us rest comfortably in the joy that having friends should bring.
I like the idea, don't get me wrong, however, I, like a couple other people, have 'secret' characters, we don't want our friends knowing. That being said, I like that it allows you to add more than one character, for one person. I think though, it'd be better if you actually met the person in a specific area, then manually added them. If that person has another name, that is already on your list, it would prompt you, saying 'so and so is already in your list, would you like to merge?' Then you can click yes, or no. Once clicking yes, instead of it showing in the left which char is active, out of all, but it remaining the original friend in the active list, it should just list the active friends name in the list to the right. Hovering over it would then bring the list of all other characters said person has.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I think that made sense. But that's my two cents. Keep up the good work, I enjoy the read already.
Kieran Storm; Master Diviner
@Lost, thanks for adding that wizard 007 twist! That may also be resolvable by allowing you to set a wizard as "Super Secret" or "Proudly Public", with the obvious result being that "Super Secret" wizards get filtered from the all wizard list.
ReplyDeleteAnd having the option to merge or not would be good as well. The more options the better, lets everyone have more control over the way they want the interface to be!
Yes, I was thinking of an option like that. Much like we have friend requests on/off, etc.
ReplyDelete