To clarify what I've said elsewhere... We will have several ways to interact with people.
Followers This will work like public Twitter profiles, where you can follow whoever you want, whenever you want. As a user, you can always see a list of who you're following, as well as a list of who is following you. When that user does something on the site like create a new forum thread or create new game content (ie a new castle in Sieger) or get a new achievement, you'll see it on your activity feed.
Friends This will work like Facebook, where your friendship invitation must be accepted by the other person. If the other person ignores your request or straight-up rejects it, you'll only have "follow" privileges. You'll always have access to your friends list of course, and either user can break the friendship connection at any time.
What's the Difference? We will place restrictions on user interaction based on whether you're a friend or follower. For example, we may restrict whether followers can post on your profile page, and armatars you upload can only be shared to your friends. We may let followers send you private messages, but we may prioritize messages from friends by highlighting them in a different color or something along those lines. Of course, any activities your friends are a part of on the site will show up on your activity feed.
Groups? Clubs? Clans? We're unsure of what we'll call it, but some time AFTER the public AG3 launch, we'd like to build the idea of a "club" or "group" setup where someone can create a group and invite people to it. These could be used for game tournaments, etc. where the players wouldn't have to be friends or followers to share comments and ideas. Users will be able to join as many of these groups as they like. Any group activity will show up in your activity feed.
Spam, noise, clutter You'll be able to filter out whose items you want to see, or not, which games you want to see, or not, etc. For example, maybe your best friend JoeUser likes to create 100 new levels for Light Bot 2 every day, and you don't play LB2 ... you can filter out LB2 messages without filtering JoeUser completely.
Larry has also talked about giving you the ability to "ban" users from your profile page, or from seeing your activities, even if they're following you on the site.
More about groups: The group activities you see in your feed will only be from groups you are a part of. You won't be able to "follow" a group. Also, you will be able to leave a group at any time.
We'll probably let users name the group whatever they want. I wouldn't want to make every active user part of an AG2 group, or everyone will get TONS of activity messages in their feeds.
Without wanting to over-complicate this, although I don't know if this is part of the planned features anyway... Would it be possible to have a list of (or a link to a page containing a list of (I know some people on sites like Facebook go group mad...)) the groups a user is currently a member of? Perhaps on their profile page?
And moreover, if the leader did have certain powers - I should imagine that there is a chance of those powers being abused. If a leader had to be removed or replaced for whatever reason - how would those powers be passed forward. I imagine that some groups may get pretty large and unless you have some sort of leadership or 'next-of-kin' system in place then I don't see how a handover of power could be achieved if a leader had to leave.
And moreover, if the leader did have certain powers - I should imagine that there is a chance of those powers being abused. If a leader had to be removed or replaced for whatever reason - how would those powers be passed forward. I imagine that some groups may get pretty large and unless you have some sort of leadership or 'next-of-kin' system in place then I don't see how a handover of power could be achieved if a leader had to leave.
There could be a Jr. Master or Vice President that could take his/her place. Maybe.
I like the idea of groups, clans, guilds, whatever you want to call them. I could see many benefits of this.
I guess you would have to have a pretty high karma in order to make a new group, and have a high enough karma to be able to manage or lead the group. You would have to have at least a +1 to join a group.
You would have to have at least a +1 to join a group.
Good thing I have this handy +5 Boots of Leadership my trust +5 Ring of Karma.
/nerdiness
Seriously though, I really dislike the whole 'groups' thing, especially as a fundamental part of AG3. We already have our little friendship cliques, and many of us have off-site chats where we hang out with those friends, so to promote groups as a part of AG3 really seems unnecessary.
Avorne, yes, I'm sure we'll make a way to list groups on your profile page.
As for group creators... Freak is correct, group creators will need a certain point/karma value. Aside from creating the group, I don't envision group creators to have any additional "owers" like mass-mailing the group members. As far as disbanding the group, it'll just go away on its own when every user leaves. Since the creator won't have any additional abilities over other users, there won't be a need to "ass on the torch."
MrWalker82, I literally lol'd at "+5 Ring of Karma" ... sounds like an achievement.
As I mentioned in the original post, when we do introduce groups down the road (well after AG3 launches), it will be primarily for game tournaments, and it'll be a total invite/opt-in or request-to-join scenario, so you can choose not to be involved if you want fewer activity notices.
@MrWalker: I don't think of factions as fundamental; I see them as an activity booster, something to have fun with as a group doing whatever struck their fancy. I'm especially fond of factions; for some reason, being in a faction just makes me all giddy inside. I can imagine different types of factions all portraying some sort of theme, like various games, hobbies, discussions, etc. It's gonna be shweet.
Oh, something to add. This faction feature needs to have something to describe it. Why not have the leader of the group have direct access to the faction's About, almost like a profile, where he or she can directly add text about the description of the group, the groups members (if not already applicable), and the ranks of the members if needed. This way, the faction can be well organized (or not) and people can frolic to the faction to see what it's all about.
Plus the usual "Faction name already taken" business.
