What improvements, if any, are coming to the group system after the new unified friends list?
TL;DRNext steps for groups include bringing friends and party features into the front end and Rob would like players to create orgs in-game, helped by the faster Building Blocks UI tech.
Oh, man, do I even want to say it? My big thing is to try and get it into the front end. So one of the goals for the friends efforts this quarter was to allow people to see, create parties, see who's online, easily add people, connect to people, get that two-way handshake, have a unified friends list so we don't have platform contacts and Spectrum contacts. We wanted to bring that all under one umbrella and just make it easy for the players to get into the game as easily as possible, with the people that they want to play with. We added stuff to easily just right-click, join contact. You can shoot off to their server immediately. You can party jump easier now. If you miss the boat on the party jump, you just have a join leader button up at the top of the party window. We're trying to do everything we can to reinforce that, get people playing together who want to be together as fast as possible. Part of that game loop, in my opinion, is jumping into the client and messaging your friend, "Hey buddy, I'm online, add me to the party." It really, to me, kind of completes that loop, and we'll have access to all the same chat functionality that we have in game as far as the groups and party chats and all that stuff. So it should be pretty easy to throw into the front end there. So yeah, that's my next big one, to kind of complete that game loop. And then from there, I don't know if I even want to say, but I'd like people to be able to create orgs in game. Those are my future thoughts on this, just to really create the backbone of the social structure here. Right now, there's things we're doing on the website that I feel like it would be great for players to be able to pull in and manage in game.
It's worth mentioning that these front-end UI features are finally starting to come in for fun stuff because we're going through this arduous process of moving that over to Building Blocks, our new UI tech, so that it's actually possible to do things in a not deprecated system. Now that that's rolling online, the features are starting to come.
As more Building Blocks features come online, you'll see these new UIs improve in terms of functionality as we just get more and more tools.
That's been the benefit of Building Blocks. We have gone through and iterated on that new front-end friend stuff so quickly compared to what it would have been in Flash. That would have been a couple quarters of work to try and get that into Flash. We could change the whole design of it right now this afternoon if we wanted to. It's that easy to kind of bounce stuff around. So it really came together very quickly. We got a little bit of a late start this quarter and we still kind of got it in before the end of the actual official quarter. And yeah, it's in PTU right now, so there it is.