Bartle stole my idea! Ok, not really…

I noticed on Lum's (Scott Jennings's) blog, this post about a post Richard Bartle made on his blog . He talks about about having a useful friends list in an MMORPG.

Which is a great idea and was even better when I talked about it last year (see #3). Ok, not quite the same, but along the same lines.

I point this all out because I REALLY want someone to steal/implement/use/claim this idea already. I'd love to see it implemented like the following:

• When you group with other people, they automatically get a +1 point (say on a 10-20 point scale).
• This would enable automatic ratings of people. Then, when you looked at the LFG list or your automatic friends list, you'd see that rating along side it. Color coding and sorting by the automatic friends rating would be great.
  • If you wanted, you could manually affect the list. You could say add to their rating, subtract from their rating, or maybe additionally full status changes such as "I always want to group with this person" or "I never want to group with this person".
• So now you have a list of people you want to group with. Overtime, you could build this list up and it would be very useful.
• Here's the good part. Allow these lists to be shared. Either when in person (i.e. – when near them) or at anytime, you could pull up another person's list and have that effect your list, if you chose. I'd love to able to preview the list before I applied to my own, or have another person's opinion not be as good as yours. So when you pulled in another person's list, it would apply as a quarter worth as much as your (i.e. – one point from another person equals .25 for your list, etc).
  • By having the friends import not be automatic, or at least having to turn on automatic importing, you could stop people from griefing across the lists…or least as much as you can stop any griefing (those damn bastards are pretty talented).

This is just talk without any real world testing, but I think the idea is sound and I REALLY want it every single MMORPG I play from now on (after testing and loving, of course). That and a whole host of other ideas that enable easy and fun social interaction. The game type is Massively Multi-Player, lets act like it and make interacting with other people not something driven by asshats.