Guild Wars 2

so, ive had this slight, annoying thing recently, related to friendlist that ive experienced in gw2.

in short, in friendlist, you can add anyone you feel like adding, and you can see their name, their location, achi points, even other characters they logs in with. and they can do this all without you knowing a thing about it, basicly getting access to alot of information regarding your account or characters, even when you wouldnt want them to get this information, such as going for alt to get some peace of mind, yet every friend would see you being on that very alt, and start whispering you even if you put invisible mode on.

and im pondering, is there any form of change planned for this friendlist system? like, you need to accept the other as friend perhaps before they can see your alt names, or that you could control how much info you let others see? or make blocks even mail wide?

cause its bit fustrating when someone starts to annoy you for some reason, you leave the zone and they follows you, you block them and you might get mails of em, or log to alt and they can see you on that very alt and come there too. basicly, making “player stalking” awfully easy in this game. cause you can just add person to the friendlist, and then remove them, while seeing their account name, character name they are on, and location sametime. and only way they could see that, is by checking “followers” list, from where you cant remove players either, unless you block, and even then they can see you online if they had you on the list. like with friend i tested it out.

he could see me online, yet couldnt whisper me, and could see where i was on with what char, even when i had blocked him.

as in my opinion, its good to have such way to communicate with friends, but it can too easily be used wrongly, or people you want to avoid for reason, or other, could easily see where your going or what named chars your playing.

Well, you have good points here. Friendlist needs some rework there….

I agree with you, there is definitely too much info shared. All they need to know IMO is the one character I’m currently on when I friend them and it should require that I accept before they friend me. If I want to share more info I’ll do it myself, and I don’t need followers, either. If someone wants to be my friend they can you know, actually talk to me and say “Hi” and send me a friend request. I’m a more private person and I just don’t like the idea of the friends list in this game.

I like how they have the friend list in the game. Especially because there are so many people with alts, but I would 150% support having to accept requests to be added to a list before any of that information is shared.

I like the amount of information the lists provide, but we need some security measures to limit who can access that information.

Nice features! I’d like to add a suggestion to only allow emails from other players IF they are on your friend’s list.

Pazernus.9273:

yet every friend would see you being on that very alt, and start whispering you even if you put invisible mode on.

Nobody should be able to send you whispers while in invis mode. It blocks it. I’ve tested this out with friends .. they don’t see me online, are standing right beside me so they know I’m on and they can’t send me a whisper.

they can see you on that very alt and come there too. basicly, making “player stalking” awfully easy in this game.

While I understand your concern on this, it appears the friendslist is like Twitter, where you can get followers you don’t even know. I wasn’t a fan of Twitter for that very reason.

However, on the other side of the coin if you have a troll player, or someone who’s just plain disruptive, you can very easily identify them if they decide to try and “hide” on an alt. I find that incredibly useful.

I didn’t realize this was the case with the friends list in game. I must admit it makes me a little nervous.
I’ve had bad experiences in other games with other players. Knowing someone could friend me and get my info w/o my permission doesn’t sit right.
I’m personally slow to friend people until I know I can trust them at least a little bit.
If what you say is true, it doesn’t matter how slow to friend I am. Anyone can friend me, watch my progress in game etc.
Why would they do that? Well, there’s trolls, player stalkers, gold sellers, and basically people that play the game to bother other people because that is what is fun to them.
This thread deserves several bumps.

Yes Badd, but pretty much every other MMO out there allows you to “friend” players without their permission. EQ2 allows it, only difference between that and GW2 setup is you know who’s added you. Other games (like EQ2, WoW) you don’t.

You have a list of ‘Followers’ and you can just block them if you don’t want them following you.

xNightMareNightx.3945:

You have a list of ‘Followers’ and you can just block them if you don’t want them following you.

We would like to be informed before someone has access to our privacy not afterwards.This issue needs to be revised in common sense.

yes night, but like i said before. you can block person from follower list, -BUT- it wont stop them from seeing you. they can still see where you are, on what char you are, and send you mails (mails i assume might be just bug). if blocking person prevents them seeing any info of you, it would be perfect system them. (meaning cant see alts names, locations, and see’s you as offline constantly, or gets you force removed of their friendlist, and prevents them re adding you)

theli.3542:

xNightMareNightx.3945:

You have a list of ‘Followers’ and you can just block them if you don’t want them following you.

We would like to be informed before someone has access to our privacy not afterwards.This issue needs to be revised in common sense.

Do you play other MMO’s? Chances are folks have friended you there without you knowing, and have access to all the details mentioned above. I guess the issue here is having too much information — knowing who’s added you, etc … Perhaps if folks didn’t know, it wouldn’t be as big a deal. It’s certainly not become an issue in other MMO’s, but maybe that’s because folks don’t realize.

jayne not quite. sure, every mmo has same “wont notify if you add a friend” function. but none of them shares as much info, such as your account “nick”, that with the numbers that you got on forums (like mine is pazernus9273) and none of them, gives your alts names (exept realid from wow far as i know).

and its in the information of sharing alts names and showing when your online with your alts too, where the problem lies.

Ah I can understand that. And I do have sympathy for the need for privacy, I tend to be a majorly private person myself.

I guess I don’t mind this system because it gives you information — both for the user and follower — and gives you the option to block someone you don’t know. It’s particularly useful for dissuading trolls .. you know the type that log off of their main and onto an alt and start stirring up nonsense “for fun” … this way they can’t hide on an alt. Y’know?

The friendlist in Guildwars 2 is an attempt to build a community, and I hope it succeeds at just that. When you friend someone, you’re friending a person, not a character. You can’t be a raging kitten on one toon, and then hop onto your main and carry on like that wasn’t you.

Jayne.9251:

theli.3542:

xNightMareNightx.3945:

You have a list of ‘Followers’ and you can just block them if you don’t want them following you.

We would like to be informed before someone has access to our privacy not afterwards.This issue needs to be revised in common sense.

Do you play other MMO’s?

No i dont and i dont care about other mmos either.I would rather like people to be able to discuss something , re-desing , and create without looking other examples.

I dont see a problem with that. If you dont want be bothered just go invisible

Wouldn’t a nice middle ground lay somewhere along the lines of us keeping our Followers, but those Followers not being allowed to know our location/level?

That should rule out any “player stalking” problems and still uphold the community/anti-troll aspects.

I understand this can be an issue to players.

But isn’t knowing who is following you better than not knowing at all, getting random PM’s, being trolled in other ways?….this way, you know who it is, can report their ALTs too if need be.

I also like the followers feature because sometimes you play with someone who you had a lot of fun with, you want to friend them, but forget. If they did friend you tho, you didn’t lose their username, easy as that, even if you realize weeks later.

I do agree, though, that an actual request or notification that someone has friend’ed you would be nice.

If people are able to whisper you when you’re invisible, then it’s bugged. Submit a bug report.

If someone is constantly following you around bothering you, even when not invisible, after you asked them to leave you alone, report them for harassment.

shaidyn.4016:

The friendlist in Guildwars 2 is an attempt to build a community, and I hope it succeeds at just that. When you friend someone, you’re friending a person, not a character. You can’t be a raging kitten on one toon, and then hop onto your main and carry on like that wasn’t you.

It would create a better community if it required me to accept the friend request. For starters, that requires people to communicate with each other which is always the start of friendship. Secondly, it notifies me if someone wants to be my friend. Did we just do a dungeon together? Or maybe we did a DE chain or some WvW? It’s nice to know that they’re friending me right then so I can make a mental note of who they are and that they want to group with me again, instead of me noticing a week later they’re a follower and wondering who they are. If I get a notification, we can start chatting and actually forming a friendship and form groups for some future stuff. That’s how they did it in Aion and it worked well.

As for other games, all people knew in other games was your one character’s name and in some games where you are on the map (although I’ve seen the latter piece of information abused in TERA to harass people and PvP or GvG them). Here’s why I prefer it more private – I can choose who to share what information with. If you want to form a community, force us to accept friend requests so it forces us to actually a) tell the person we want to be their friend, and b) forces us to communicate. That’s all you need to form communities. They don’t need to know anything else about me to group up and do something together.