A lot of folks in the Spectrum thread were conflating the group system with the organization system. At this point, in tier zero, they're not linked in any way, shape or form?
TL;DRGroups are intended to eventually contain organizations, but the two aren't linked in Alpha 3.2; a party is a gameplay-focused kind of group, and they're currently the same.
Groups are intended to be able to contain organizations and their features, which is why we had to make such a broad approach for the first time. But those two things aren't linked yet in Alpha 3.2.
Something worth mentioning too, at least for internal terms: when we're saying groups, it's usually the more generic thing. This could be just a group of friends that like to talk to each other. So that's the generic thing. Whereas a party is specifically: we're all online playing together right now. So groups could be everything. Party is a specific case of a group.
Well, you don't actually have to be online to be part of a party. Sort of.
Yeah, group is more of a thing that will be mostly used on Spectrum, but the party system will be on Spectrum but also effectively doing something gameplay-wise.
Yeah, it also handles all the stuff about if you get disconnected, how do you get back into the same instance, if you're doing any matchmaking at all.
Yes, so party is more of the gameplay-wise groups.
So it sounds like there's a distinction between groups and parties that we'll probably be chasing around for the next couple weeks or months over development, trying to better delineate what constitutes a group versus what constitutes a party.
Yeah, right now they're the same, but in the future you could have groups that are not parties. Like 10 guys, we all talk and play together, but maybe only two are online right now.
You could use a group to turn it into a party and be like, all these people are in my party again, but now I'm going to go play with these people instead.
Like during the Vulture promotion, we mentioned, I think it was a Wayfarer's Club. That would be a group.
So group could be everything. It's like the rectangle and a square thing, right? A square is a rectangle, because it's just a subset of what a rectangle could be. Groups are everything. Parties are a specific kind of group.