Issues/Question with Guild and Friend Invites

[Flobbs]

Can someone explain to me how Guild invites work please?

I have come to realize that the Guild system is confusing. I just created a Guild for the first time. I have 3 characters and I have a friend who has 2 characters. We want to get all 5 of them into the same Guild. I created the Guild on my main character and proceeded to send invites to my other chars and my friend's chars, as well (through the social form in the player options). I found that I am not able to send invites unless the person is actually online. If they are offline, it says "Player does not exist" (apparently, this is not as easy as searching the database for known players). Once I got my friend online, I was able to send him an invite and it said "invite sent to XYZ" so I assumed it worked, but, they never received the invite. I tried adding them to a party and sending the invite again, and to no avail. Nothing I did would actually send an invite even though it told me it sent one. I found that when I was in the same area as my friend (same part of the map) and we were physically next to one another, then I could click on his name and go to invite -> Guild invite, and he was able to join at that point through the menu options as opposed to the Social form in player options.

QUESTIONS:

I am confused on why the developers only designed this to where invites can be sent to players who are physically online and will not search the DB for offline players? (I have tested this multiple times and this seems to be the case)

And

Aside from searching for people, can I also not invite people unless they are physically online? I cannot add any of my other 2 characters at all if this is the case. This also seems to be the case with sending friend requests.


I just think this is a poorly designed approach with no real reason as to why that I can think of? If John Doe is working and not online but I am, why should I not be allowed to send him a friend or Guild invite and he can just pick it up when he logs on?


thanks

[Zealouss]

Well i can't answer on behalf of the developers but maybe the amount of players if too overwhelming for the database to search as there are lots of people creating accounts and leaving, meaning there are so many permanently offline accounts that also contribute to this substantial amount of players/characters that already exist, the database cannot handle the numbers without doing a mass server sweep and deleting all inactive players (using time+level requirements for the sweep) like has had to be done on many other games.

I suppose that preventing sending guild invites to people offline prevents the use of abusing invites, setting up a bot to invite a bunch of players to the guild when they're offline. if the database just sticks to the players that are online, it can stop this from happening.
As for friend requests, you CAN send them to people even if they're offline, they'll get it when they log on. Trying it with your other characters on the same account won't work as if you think about it, it's pretty pointless to have your own characters added as they can't be online at the same time. :/

-SS

[Flobbs]

I can see your points, but you can likewise place in criteria limiting those who are inactive just as easy as searching for those who are online, as well, so I don't think it is the case of reducing load and increase response time, perhaps it is but I don't see how it would be of much benefit. Behind everything it is just fielded data, so if I type in "invite player XYZ", it's just a matter of updating the database with an invite flag. I don't think you truly need to run a search for players, obviously it does (which is the problem I am having :smile: ). You are right in that I can't speak for the developers. Although, I am a dba and software engineer and am in no wise developmentally-illiterate, I am not a game developer, so I lack understanding in this field, nor can I speak for their architecture, since every architecture is its own unique beast. I just find it more of a hardship.

[inkredible]

You just have to re-invite , Invitation expires.. so if it doesnt work after a bunch of invitation, ask ur friend to log out and log back in and try again
sometimes tho i think its bugged... invitation doesnt show up