Friend system allows invasion of privacy and account-wide harassment, with no way to opt-out

There are a few problems with the friend system as it exists currently, related to privacy, enabling harassment.

- When adding friends, this exposes the account name of a player without consent of the target party
- When adding friends if the target person declines, the target friend is still added to the requesting player's friend list; allowing stalking of that character across the entire player account
- There is no way to opt out of the friend request global social system without also disabling trade and chat system availability (/dnd is all or nothing)
- If the target player ignores the friend-requester, the target player is not removed from the requester's friend list; however if a request is made to an ignored player the request will be denied and the player will not be added to the person's friend list (the latter behavior should be the same as the former).

I won't expose publicly all of the nefarious things one can do with the player's account name, and being able to passively stalk a player's accounts, but it's generally not ideal.

By allowing non-bidirectional friending it allows in-game stalking and harassment across different characters. This is really bad given how trivial it is to create dummy accounts with the game and how aggressively toxic a very small minority of players are.

What this should do:

- Friends should not be added to a friend list unless there is explicit approval from the target side
- If after adding the target friend removes and/or ignores the requester, then that friend should be removed from the requesting friend list
- The account name of a friend request should not be exposed in a friend request unless or until the target party accepts the friend request

- There should be a global option to disable friend requests much like there is an option to change portal permissions in the hideout, without also disabling trade availability and chat-systems availability

- If its just not possible to change the default behavior, then at the very least make the friend request system opt-in; so the defaults can be how everything is today but allow people to choose to by-default not allow friend requests AND concurrently don't allow non-friends to view a player's status.

For reference on why this matters to me: I've had to make my profile private in prior leagues because it was possible to associate my player account with another game and from there use one of the character names to identify me on other social systems. This led to real-life threats/harassment for me from someone angry over a trade. I've since had to switch to a non-identifying account name and use character names that would in no way identify me elsewhere. This all stems from how the friend and (non)privacy system allows this type of behavior and provide no opt-out.

I was reminded today of how broken the friend system is because I rolled a new character and was immediately messaged by someone that I had helped kill a boss for earlier in the league; I declined the person's friend request but of course they were still allowed to keep me on their side friend's list.

Thanks.

- When adding friends, this exposes the account name of a player without consent of the target party.
actually this is partially incorrect, any communication with a player, pm's, party invites, etc... reveal the account name, your account name is not private information.




By allowing non-bidirectional friending it allows in-game stalking and harassment across different characters. This is really bad given how trivial it is to create dummy accounts with the game and how aggressively toxic a very small minority of players are.

report these players to support, GGG can investigate them to find the main accounts and take action.

It isn't even a 'friend' system. It's a 'follow' system, which is a bare shade of a cat's pube shy of a 'stalking' system.

And OH SURPRISE, it's been that way ever since Closed Beta. PoE has the worst fucking social UI of any online-only game I've ever played...and I played Legend of the Red Dragon.

PS There is a way to opt-out, but you wouldn't like it.

totally agree, was one of the very first things that didnt sit right with me that I discovered about this game

UP

this needs to stop for real

This is a QoL request (like so incredibly many in recent years) so i think it will be fixed in approximately 5-6 years from now - optimistically speaking.

Coming out of my self-imposed exile from this forum because this is something extremely important that OP (and everyone else) should know.

SET YOUR ACCOUNT TO PRIVATE. Only by setting your personal profile to 100% private can you escape the more nefarious applications of this system. People will still be able to find out when you're online and message you from dummy accounts (every single league I get more people asking me about the goddamn CTR, after all), but they won't be able to access any of your information.