Buddy List Limitations Are Silly
When I saw Chris Paladino's most recent post on Managing the 100-Person Friend List I had three thoughts:
- God bless us geeks and our obsessive ways. Only the best among us would use Excel to scrupulously catalog their play habits.
- Why on Earth is there a 100-person friend limit on Xbox Live?
- And why on Earth must one keep a spreadsheet like that when software can do it for you?
Xbox Live attempts this last bit for you with their "Recently Played" list. That's a great feature and I use it all the time. It doesn't have all the detail that the spreadsheet contains, so I can understand the need, I guess. But why the 100-person limit? It seems antithetical to the whole concept of a buddy list.
I have 573 buddies on my list, gathered across 50+ games over the past 5 years. I met n3Eo playing Tony Hawk 4 on the PS2 back in 2002. I see him playing Command & Conquer 3 most often these days. BT_Davids owns me when we play Battlefield 2142. XchiN still pops up playing C&C Renegade almost every single day.
Do I play with n3Eo or XchiN? Nope, not in years. But their very presence on my list has a huge impact on my sense of community. I'm a part of a large - and growing - group with some real history. Limiting it to 100 would mean severing ties with people I gamed with in the past.
Creating a vibrant community is, afterall, the whole point of a buddy list. Don't you have buddies from high school or college that you very rarely see or talk to? And when you do speak you trade stories about the crazy night when you trashed the quad after your football team won. (Or something.) Should you excise them from your life because you hadn't interacted more than 4 times over the past 3 months and 27 days?
No, of course not.
And you shouldn't have to with your buddy list in games, either.
Now Chris mentions "non-trivial technical hurdles" that are the source of this limit.
I'll be blunt and say that seems rather hand-wavy to me. We've been helping game develpers add buddy lists to their games for years now with no limitations at all.
It is our job as technologists to find solutions to the problems that users have. It is our job to enable them with tools and functionality to build a vibrant community.
"Non-trivial hurdles" be damned.
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