Early thoughts

[Laura de Leon]

First of all, and most important, the new system works. I can add friends in no time at all (if I type their nickname correctly) and I can send gifts.

Second, the 20 friend limit is to be much more of an issue.

I have more than 20 people I regularly interact with. With Facebook friends (when it was working correctly), I had an easy directory to go to, listing all of my friends. Now,if I take someone off my list, I have to remember their nickname and how to spell it to out them back on,

Also, since I am likely to have 20 friends active at any time (as will most of my friends), we will have to be online at the same time to send to each other, since they can't add me if I am already at 20 people (and vice versa).I play with friends all over the world! Our schedules don't overlap all that much.

Before the Facebook system broke, one thing I enjoyed was a rotating system of randomly gifting fish. I would start at the beginning of my FB friend list, and add people one at a time until I found one with space for my spare fish. I'd leave that person on my list, so I would know where to start the next time. This allowed me to help occasional players, potentially keeping them interested in the game. I can't do that with the new system.

Some possible solutions:
1) This is a long term solution. Make a second level of inactive friends, that can be much longer. (Or remove limits on the number of active friends).

2) Keep a strictly text based list of people we have been friends with before, that we can scroll or that will autocomplete.

3) Upping the number of active friends would help.

[Zen Koi Test Group]

Hello, thank you for your feedback.

After much consideration, we will keep the friends list to 20 with an overflow of 3 invited players (outgoing). As increasing overall friends list will exponentially increase the cost of storing friends data. You may want to consider keeping a list of your favourite friends on a note app. This can help you manage your own list, so you can easily copy and paste friend's nicknames, especially if you add and remove friends frequently.

[Adrienne]

Keeping to 20 with no "reserve" has actively broken the game for me. I actually bought Monster Candy and watch the ads to support the company since I can't really afford the koi very often. I would rather abandon this update and keep the old system.

[Patty]

I understand data storage costs is a concern for Landshark. On the other hand, keeping a personal list of your in-game friends is not user-friendly. Would it be an option for the game itself to keep a list of people you have traded with?

Could the game list the people you have traded with, where the game lists their name, and the player can click on that name to copy it, then the player can go to their Friends page to paste it in, without worrying about if they spelled it correctly or did the capitalization correctly? This would allow players to re-add friends without needing to check an external list.

[Lylaina Lux]

I agree with Laura. 

The Limitation is a big problem for the most user.. for the reasons mentioned. I also interact daily with a lot of friends and it is sad to have to delete them all the time! Since I can no longer choose from a large list of friends, "this problem" has rather increased. In addition, the process has been extendedto send gifts to friends, as they must confirm the request. -> With a longer friends list that would be no problem!

I was hoping that an update solves this problem and we get a bigger list of friends. :( I find the solution suggestions of laura great.

[Laura de Leon]

Hello, ZK2,

This answer took me by surprise. 

I had assumed that each user was assigned a unique identifier, and that storing the list of friends was as simple as storing this list of IDs.  The identifiers would not have to be very large, I would think an integer or possibly long integer to be generous (or the equivalent in whatever language is being used) would be sufficient. The list would then only need to be of these identifiers I would think. All other data would be stored in the central entry for the user, which would be necessary no matter how long the list.

Running your own friend system was always going to be a difficult, resource intensive task. I am quite impressed that you designed and implemented a basic, functional system in this time. The system as implemented seems like a solid basis for a new system. 

However, it needs to grow from here. This system is NOT an improvement over the broken Facebook based system, For those of us that the system was functioning, but badly, we are still in the position of having a base group of 20 friends, and changing one of these for another being a time consuming, risky move. There are many people who had no problems with Facebook, and they are straight out losing functionality with this change.

The cost of adding a player is not just that of looking up their name in an external database each person will need to maintain, but of then going through the invitation process each and every time. With the Facebook friend system, maintaining that connection was relatively inexpensive. Here, it requires devoting a rare and precious friend spot to maintain. 

I suppose that one option would be to treat the friend list like pond slots, where you can use pearls to buy additional capacity. You start with a base of 20 friends, adding the first 5 is relatively inexpensive,  and gets pricier after that.

Another way would be to find a way to make the two systems coexist, so users could choose to have friends in both worlds.

Please, find some way to address this limitation. 

Laura

[Julia]

And if you implement a kind of "note-space", that's saved on our devices, where we can type and copy the names or own thoughts?
I dislike to switch between game and other apps

[Jon Tevington]

Will you be making friend nicknames copyable from the app so that we can past into another app, such as Google Docs or whatever scratchpad comes with the device?

[Sutato]

Thank you for everyone's feedback. Here are some of our thoughts regarding the new friend system:

Mutual Friendship

The main and most important reason why we needed friends to be mutual, is to prevent unsolicited gifting of Koi from people you don't know. We are unable to keep a list of players you've traded with previously, other than your friends list, because that can perpetuate unsolicited gifting. We do hear how some of you want to gift freely to players outside of your 20 mutual friends and that the new system is limiting your social interactions. We understand this is what makes the community of players such a great and supportive group.

Our Purpose

Developing this friend system was largely because the Facebook friend system started to have problems. For the old Facebook system, players' friends list data is kept with Facebook and not on our servers. This means players are already friends within the Facebook system (hence already mutual).  Now, as we take on this new friends system ourselves, we have to store similar information. We hope players understand this detail as there is cost to us that we can't underestimate. Additionally, there are many parents who wrote in to us wishing they could play with their son or daughter, but their child wasn't old enough for a Facebook account, this feature is for them.

Moving forward, we will release this new friends feature, together with other bug fixes. We will continue to review some of your suggestions and feedback, and monitor players' use of the new friends system. We hope to keep improving it in future.

Zen Koi Team

On Thursday, August 8, 2019 at 4:52:17 PM UTC+8, laura.deleon wrote: