Feedback/Request: Please make friend list account wide

[Gilandilas Weidenwind]

I like alts and I cannot lie - I think I am not alone though.

It would be considerably easier to hook up if you friend an account with all the alts instead of single characters.
In case somebody wants to be anonymous on an alt, maybe add a hidden tag as well? I see no reason for this but there might be people who want that for ... whatever reason, i cannot come up with any.

 

[Yarpen Zigran]

I think this is a great idea. Surnames would be great for enabling this too. Like if your characters share surnames their friend lists overlap.

 

[Sintax]

I wholeheartedly agree. This was a topic I brought up a while back and still feel rather strongly about having friend lists (and guild membership) on an account basis rather than character basis.

I think the solution though can be as simple as a better UI that would group characters by account/username in our lists. The underlying structure need not be altered or changed. It's a display problem, not an architectural problem.

As an added benefit, we'd be able to identify and refer to players by their chosen usernames, not the names of the various characters they have created and play just because the game forces you to name each character. This is something that continues to feel horribly awkward and confusing.

 

[Meladry]

I love this idea. It's so hard to keep track of who's who in a guild. Almost every MMO I've played in the past has had a system like that, even an old game like Guild Wars 2. Account name doesn't have to be in the nameplate, but at least you can inspect their profile and see who they are, or it's next to their character name in the guild/friend list, etc.

 

[Undone]

The system was designed from the get go so that characters were independent from the account. This was done for a number of reasons (privacy, technical implementation, etc). I'm not saying that this was the correct decision but it was a decision we made early on in development. We're certainly open to re-evaluating this in the future but understand is unlikely to happen any time soon due to the limited size of the team coupled with all the work we still have left to do.