Are there party size limits?
TL;DRThe party limit is currently eight internally, carried over from the old party system that still runs in parallel, and it isn't final, since they plan to adjust it based on how players use parties.
Maybe I can answer the question. For now, it's set to eight, but it can be decided by design when we push it out the door. So it's not decided yet. For now, internally, it's eight.
You might want to talk about the reason why it's eight, because of the old party system.
No, I just realized that it's not something about it. So it's just fixed to eight somehow.
Yeah, well, I actually know a little bit about this from other conversations with Kirk. You have to start with an arbitrary number. Whenever you're doing anything, these processes start with: let's just pick a number and see if we can hit it and see how it works. And then from that, you decide whether that's too much and you go down, or it's not enough and you go up. One of the great things about running a live environment in the middle of our development is we don't have to make those final decisions on our own. We can pick an arbitrary number like eight, put that system out in 3.2 as eight, and then watch for the next three months, six months, nine months how these parties come together, how easy it is to fill, what they can do versus what they can't do, and then adjust that number holistically, based on what we see in YouTube videos, what we see on Twitch channels, what we see in Spectrum conversations. So it's one of the great advantages that we have of having a live environment in the middle of our development. We don't have to do tons of internal focus testing to figure out what that number is. We can start a place and let you guys tell us what that number should be in many cases.
One thing to add about the max number of the party: the system is designed to hold, I'm not saying unlimited, but a potentially unlimited number of players in the group.
But there's a lot of unknowns in that. The amount of data that the party needs to keep track of, of each other's members, having that be unbounded is potentially problematic. So eight felt safe. Let's not deal with those problems just yet. We have so many other problems.
Yeah, many, many problems. News to me, I thought eight was coming from the old party system. It is coming from the old party system. That's what's really interesting, maybe for people interested in a more technical aspect of what we're working on. To deliver what we wanted to deliver for 3.2 with new UI for the party system and various new features, there were a couple of critical features that were locked behind the old party system that we could not just redo. So the biggest thing is getting into the same server as your friends from the main menu is handled by our back end. Guys in Austin are writing it. The General Instance Manager is this big piece of code which gets people into servers. The GIM. If this has been talked about before on RTV, it's the GIM. And so we need this to get people into the same servers. And we talked to the guys in Austin, like, hey, we're redoing partying. We want to get people into the same server. What do we do? We need your help. And basically they're jam-packed with tons of work right now. They could not separate out the party aspect from the GIM that we needed right now. To bring it full circle, the thing that's interesting, technically speaking, is the old parties are not fully deprecated right now. A new party also has an old party, and they're basically functioning in parallel. So all the old UI still works. You could bring up F11. You could still do that, because when we make a new party for you, we're also making an old party behind the scenes that you don't have to worry about, so that you could get into the same server as your friends. So they're both in parallel.
And that's just because the feature teams don't always work in parallel. You guys have hit this part, but our platform team in Austin haven't been able to...
Yeah, they're scheduled out up the wazoo. So next quarter, I think they're trying to separate some of these features out of the GIM. But currently, that's where the eight comes from, I believe: because the old party's at eight. So we need to say, all right, well, we're keeping parity with the old party system for now.