Friends List Concerns

[ThomasNoman]

8 minutes ago, Entity said:

That's true, but it would be a pity to not use such a useful tool for alternate purposes, especially since you have way fewer IC friends than people who you have to or want to interact with. Realistically speaking, your character is always 'online' but due to various limitations and time zone differences, we can't be online 24/7 OOCly.

 

The list should not be of people you know ICly, that'd be a by the book example of mixing IC and OOC. People's online status is an OOC matter while IC friends are an IC matter. A character would always be somewhere, it can't be 'offline'.

 

Okay, I understand what you mean in general, but the fact you can see anyone being online or not even with alerts to see if they have just started roleplaying, or are they going to log off soon.... promotes metagaming. It can be malicious more than useful. Personally, I don't roleplay illegal characters, but I can think of many ways I could maliciously use the system if I had a criminal character.

 

A good use of the friend list system for me is for IC girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, sister, manager, landlord or other connections.

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by ThomasNoman

[CrisisGG]

9 minutes ago, Garras Up said:

I understand why it could be a concern but I don't particularly think it's as big of an issue as some may think it is. People have used the friends system on other servers for years and it has never been used maliciously.

I think the main issue for me personally is that it is a massive breach of my privacy, I don't want people knowing when I'm online all the time, I'd sooner interact with them on my own accord rather than being barraged by PM's or asked why I'm not responding to them after they send a message immediately when I log in.

[Entity]

14 minutes ago, ThomasNoman said:

 

Okay, I understand what you mean in general, but the fact you can see anyone being online or not even with alerts to see if they have just started roleplaying, or are they going to log off soon.... promotes metagaming. It can be malicious more than useful. Personally, I don't roleplay illegal characters, but I can think of many ways I could maliciously use the system if I had a criminal character.

 

A good use of the friend list system for me is for IC girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, sister, manager, landlord or other connections.

 

I also roleplay fully legal characters, but I do see your point. I believe you're talking about cases in which a faction would be notified when members of another are online so they can attack them, kidnap them and such. I don't think that's a malicious use though. It's extremely realistic. We have to keep in mind that ICly, our characters are always there. If someone wants to kidnap someone else, realistically, they could always stop by their house at night. However, due to limitations, you can only do that when the other person is online.

 

Besides, this is something that's already happening. If someone wants to know whether a specific person or group of people are online, they're already spamming /id every now and then. Having a tool to facilitate this just makes it easier and less of a hassle, which was the purpose of the whole thing anyway. It's not like without it these things wouldn't happen. They still do but it's just more unnecessary work to reach the same conclusion.

 

11 minutes ago, CrisisGG said:

I think the main issue for me personally is that it is a massive breach of my privacy, I don't want people knowing when I'm online all the time, I'd sooner interact with them on my own accord rather than being barraged by PM's or asked why I'm not responding to them after they send a message immediately when I log in.

True, but again, it's something that's already happening. If someone wants to know if someone else is only, for whatever reason, they can just do /id. Our characters are always 'online', anyway. This wouldn't change anything except for facilitate a lot of interactions (both positive and negative for your characters). There's situations in which your character wouldn't benefit from said interactions but are nonetheless realistic and expected. If you have a warrant on you, for example. Realistically speaking, law enforcement would be able to track and arrest you at any time (if you don't take any measures against it) - while you're working, sleeping, walking the dog. It wouldn't make sense to let people be arrested only when they want to because they simply wouldn't want to. That's why we have to keep in mind the difference between OOC and IC. The list is an OOC tool, it's not a Facebrowser friends list with is IC.

 

This is just my opinion, though.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Entity

[TomRom97]

It's a good feature, but it should definitely be a two way thing. I mean being someone's friend is a mutual agreement in a sense.

[CrisisGG]

1 minute ago, Entity said:

True, but again, it's something that's already happening. If someone wants to know if someone else is only, for whatever reason, they can just do /id. Our characters are always 'online', anyway. This wouldn't change anything except for facilitate a lot of interactions (both positive and negative for your characters). There's situations in which your character wouldn't benefit from said interactions but are nonetheless realistic and expected. If you have a warrant on you, for example. Realistically speaking, law enforcement would be able to track and arrest you at any time (if you don't take any measures against it) - while you're working, sleeping, walking the dog. It wouldn't make sense to let people be arrested only when they want to because they simply wouldn't want to. That's why we have to keep in mind the difference between OOC and IC. The list is an OOC tool, it's not a Facebrowser friends list with is IC.

I get that this is a tool that could be used for making arrests, though perhaps a different functionality should exist to serve warrant purposes, rather than relying on something publicly available for everybody. For me, this isn't necessarily an In Character concern and more of an Out of Character concern, as the main thing that bothers me is that people will be able to see whenever I'm online throughout any of my characters as opposed to just one they know I play and the name of said character.

[Nervous]

It'll be moved to a request system on next update.

[St3fan[NL]]

And also another note.

 

Your FRIENDLIST is YOUR list. The people who claimed to see all of the others persons alternative characters is not true. You only see the specific character YOU added.