Friendslist and Blacklist needs fixing

[LianaThorne]

Personal experience I had; Removed someone from my friendslist who ended up being... yeah. I didn't wish to interact with them anymore, but they were still able to teleport to my estate because....?

The system DOES need an overhaul of some kind. Need to have people pester SQ - maybe on a live stream? Find places you're able to submit questions and put it in? Social Media? etc.

I just suggest all of these different avenues because, supposedly, they don't listen to the western audience/these forums, even though, you know, WaNtInG tO APpEaL tO tHEm in their most recent shareholder meeting, but I digress lmfao

ᶜʸᵃ ˡᵃᵗᵉʳ, ᵇᵘᶜᵏᵒᵎ

Here's the issue with the housing thing because even if they remove the ability to teleport to your FC or whatever, nothing is stopping the person from simply walking to your ward and to your front door. I don't think a fix for that is even possible because of how the neighborhoods are set up. Ultimately if Square isn't going to fix their friends list/black list faults then they need to have better access to GMs to handle issues. I was able to get my own stalker situation sorted by them but I know many don't get that same option.

[Amarande]

Here's the issue with the housing thing because even if they remove the ability to teleport to your FC or whatever, nothing is stopping the person from simply walking to your ward and to your front door. I don't think a fix for that is even possible because of how the neighborhoods are set up.

Yep, this is an organic problem with the neighborhood system; I expect the Lord of the Rings MMO has the very same potential issues as well (it's just that the much smaller player base there tends to mitigate them, both by having far fewer people - especially general trolls, who tend to go where there's the most people to rile up - to worry about and by the fact that the smaller the playerbase, the more important it is not to be a jerk if you want to do anything social in the future). Black Desert, too, but the average Black Desert home is so likely to either be completely empty or a psychedelic mess of random cash shop furniture that most people don't really even care about visiting other folks' houses (unlike XIV, where touring neighborhoods to see the pretty decorations is a not infrequent casual pastime).

I'm not sure there's that great a solution for it though because instanced housing goes to the other extreme: typically, instanced houses are almost too inaccessible to others. Often, you not only need to be on someone's friends list, but in some systems you even need to actually be partied with them before you can visit their home. Entering guild houses is typically exclusively restricted to actual members (so no more FCs throwing parties for the server/datacenter under such a system). Especially in games this heavily based around instanced content as the main max level activity, it even actively contributes to a ghost town environment (remember WoD in WoW where everyone just hung in their Garrison all day and you barely saw anyone at all unless you were in a PvP or raid area?).

Ultimately if Square isn't going to fix their friends list/black list faults then they need to have better access to GMs to handle issues. I was able to get my own stalker situation sorted by them but I know many don't get that same option.

All large online social systems suffer from this issue; I'm not actually even sure it's economically viable (especially with how much stuff is based in Cali, where wages and COL are so high that your subscription basically just pays a janitor to clean up the coffee cups from a meeting) to humanly police the system, unless we're going to go back to the old 90s days of pay-per-hour/minute online socialization.

Unfortunately, humans are also necessary to police the system (as we see with how poorly the automated enforcement on YouTube, Facebook or Discord can operate, and the free-fall collapse of Twitter after the mass staff departure, we are nowhere close to machine learning being able to handle it on its own).

This is actually why I sometimes fear that MMO devs have been beginning to actively throw the casual social player under the bus: it's simply becoming too heavy a responsibility to have to moderate a large social environment, while if things were more purely about streaming and e-sports, the former would seem to be mostly Twitch's problem while in the latter, there at least should be a greater expectation of professionalism to mitigate misbehavior ...

[Gralna]

From what I understand devs are worried if they make unfriending someone apply to both players, that it'll create stressful situations where someone is confronted about removing them from their friends list.

Why this is, I have no idea, I've been playing MMO's since 2001 and can never recall major drama in any of the communities from unfriending someone, unfriending was usually a result of already existing drama.

Do I agree with this reasoning? Not really, I actually find it more awkward sending someone a friend request when I was already on theirs (typically from removing inactive friends, that then come back). It has also been pointed out in multiple other threads here and across various social media platforms, it gives too many tools to stalkers.

https://gamerescape.com/2019/01/04/y...-yoshi-p-walk/

https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fanta...orn/harassment