Where have all my friends gone?

Is the opening line from one of my favourite songs by a band called The Jayhawks and when I’ve been browsing the forums of late, it keeps popping up in my head and won’t go away all day. But that’s really beside the point, it really just prompted me to write a brief piece on what we changed with the friend system, and why we did it.

The PKR community and way we empower people to express themselves through the emote/mood system and the design of their Avatars is one of the cornerstones of our success. We always approached the design of PKR form this perspective, and despite the concepts of friendship and community being counter to a lot of people's iseas of what poker is all about, we believed that it would work. That said, our first version of the friends system didn’t really deliver what it was intended to and was only really useful as a tracking tool.

Friends are an important part of PKR, the ability to forge bonds on the site delivers an emotionally heightened experience over and above that delivered by others and this is not an accident – an experience that is close to ‘live’ play will inevitably encourage emergent, spontaneous social bonds. When emotional experiences are shared with your friends and enemies in a deeply immersive, personalised environment in which players can express themselves and communicate they are all that more real. The highs and lows of Poker only serves to enhance this effect.

Anyway, we knew we could improve on this sense of community and wanted to move towards a more reciprocal friends system, to create value – for our users and PKR – in a social network. Which we have now done with the release of version 1.9. But we also realised that some people have a LOT of friends and many of them didn’t really know it, which is why we turned your old ‘friends’ into Tagged players in your friends list. If you have them tagged just so you can keep on fishing then that’s all good, but if you are genuinely connected to that person as a friend then you can invite them to be your friend and then start building a network of reciprocal connections throughout the community. It’s brought more meaning to the experience and some people may have panicked that we’d deleted all their friends at first, but trust me, they are all there.

So, we had to move to this 2-tier system. Imagine how you’d feel on the day you logged in after we changed the friend system and you had 500 fishermens’ friend invites on your MyPKR page. It’s nice to popular for the right reasons.