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.
MrWalker82, I literally lol'd at "+5 Ring of Karma" ... sounds like an achievement.
Yah, it was standard issue when you joined the Army while G. W. Bush was in office XD
@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.
Hmm... I suppose I've never considered that. I guess it would be fitting, especially given the number of highly popular multi-player games that we have now. Very well, I stand correct. Make all the dang groups/factions/guilds you want XD
Ah, you're taking all the fun out of informal groups
Otherwise I like the friend/follower idea but shouldn't followers be aloud to post on your profile? Otherwise it might be a tad bit harder to make new friends.
Well, feel free to suggest more ideas here, but as I've already said, "groups" will be implemented after AG3 fully launches... We're looking at several months before something like this will get worked on.
Samy, you're right, followers *should* be able to post on the walls of those they follow, it was just an example of the kinds of restrictions we're thinking about.
There would need to be some way to organize the groups. Maybe only the OP could be posted explaining the group and linking to its profile, or however an individual group would be coordinated.
I proposed a leader-made profile that organized the faction by descriptions of the faction and the organization of the members. Does each faction need its own separate forum discussion? It seems a little....useless to me.
I suppose a faction could create its own forum elsewhere need be.
My point is that if someone makes a group I want to join but the creator does not inform me how would I know? Would there be a master list with a brief group description, perhaps group tags.
My thinking is that we'd tie groups to specific games, and have a way to list the groups for each game along with their member count. Not sure exactly how this would look, haven't discussed this with the webde team at all, etc.
My thinking is that we'd tie groups to specific games, and have a way to list the groups for each game along with their member count. Not sure exactly how this would look, haven't discussed this with the webde team at all, etc.
What about the groups who play multiple games? I'm sure that with both ExitPath and Colony being such big hits that there will be large amounts of members who are on both games and may like that represented by their group.
The idea of groups sounds great and I've had some experience with such a feature on a website here in the Netherlands called 'Hyves'. Mind you, this is a social network, but it's much like the suggestion and idea of this group-forming here on AG! Maybe cormyn can have a look at it and use whatever he sees fit?
