un|we|sen

And you need a long friends list. Even when you’re in an active guild, it’s sometimes hard to find the right people at the right time, to go into a five man instance with you. Finding more than two people to do something with is fairly hard in WoW.

So why not go for a radically different approach, and borrow a page from big, thriving online-communities, such as friendster, orkut, or even business platforms such as LinkedIn?

Rather than describe those platforms and their similarities, let me jump straight in and describe what I’d think of as an ideal replacement for the restrictive friends list in WoW.

Imagine that you can, for each of your characters individually, or for your whole user account, submit some information about yourself. Imagine you can describe what instances you want to go to, whether you like PvP¹, or which area you want to explore. Imagine furthermore that you can add friends to an (unlimited length) list, and can in turn see these friends lists of your friends, or of anyone really.

In order for that to work, and for privacy concerns², you’ll need to have fine-grained control over what your friends or other people can see from your profile:

• You may want to have a completely hidden profile, that shows no more than it shows right now – your name, character class, level, guild and the area you’re in right now. Even that could be restricted further.
• You may want to share everything only with a few select close friends, and not so much with others. Either granting access rights to individual people, or to groups of acquaintances, would work for that. Granting access to groups gives the added benefit that new entries to your friends list could be initially ungrouped, and thus without access rights, until you explicitly grant them a certain level of access.
• You may want to restrict your contact list, especially, or groups within your list. That is, I might wish my close friends to share the list of my close friends, but not so much the list of people I occasionally trade with.
• If you can group your contacts – let’s stop calling them friends, and be more neutral about this – why not also form groups for people you dislike? You could tick an option to ignore all messages from people in this group, thereby having an ignore list. Even better, you could share this ignore list, possibly adding a comment to each person stating why you ignore them. Or you could have a separate group of people that are nice enough, but not great to go on adventures with, and comment on why you prefer to go alone. That feature alone is worth gold for finding people on your friends’ contact lists to invite to a group, or to stay away from.
• Last but not least, you could grant select players the ability to see some information about yourself that’s not restricted to a single character you play – your other characters, and email address, a picture maybe.

1. Player vs. player combat – in WoW you can control whether you want to participate in that or stick to PvE, player vs. environment, that is fighting computer controlled monsters only. [↩]
2. Privacy is an important issue, especially in a game world like WoW. In games, you’re that more likely to have children wandering around, and you wouldn’t want them to be exposed to people that mean them harm. [↩]

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