Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Character Relationships

One development I would love to see is the ability to add characters as more than just friends, acquaintances, family, or enemies. A significant other category appears to be the most obvious next-step. Perhaps there could be an option for each user to create a custom relationships category (e.g. roommate, Master/slaves, etc.).

Please excuse me if this subject was already raised.

Cheers,

Eve

Hey! Although the system only recognizes the mentioned relations, you are actually able to customize the terms displayed on your profiles. Admittedly, it still leaves a person limited to 4 categories, but those are built to be fairly broad categories. You mention roommate and master/slave as examples, but I'd figure "roommate" can fit into friend or acquaintance, perhaps with the custom note specifying, and I think master/slave could fit into whichever group most accurately describes the tone of the relationship (perhaps family, even).

i understand what you're saying, novalynn, but i second hell
being able to add 'significant other' would make me far happier.

I'd definitely like a few more options for character relations! The flavor text is helpful and works just fine, but I would certainly love to see more choices to go with.

"Roommate" and "Master/slave" were just the first random examples that popped into my head, but I think having a few extra categories -- at the very least, a significant other category, which arguably won't overlap with "friend" -- would be wonderful. I do understand your position, though, novalynn.

I have long seen the potential and usefulness of custom categories, but I've yet to fully commit to adding them.

As with anything that would then appear in notifications, i.e., various places on the site without opportunity for a flag or warning, I immediately turn to questions of moderation and possible abuse. Imagine someone creating a "**** buddies" relationship category and proceeding to transfer a bunch of previous acquaintances into that category, and then imagine the social morass that results as all those people's friends are notified of the change.

Things like this will be rare, of course, but it still gives me pause. This is why so far the renaming of these categories has been relegated to widgets only, not site-wide feeds and the like.

I know this is a couple months old but Kim, I had something similar, maybe having the custom relationship set up to where it has to be approved by you or someone who runs the website along with you so inapropriate names won't offend any of the other players!

A possibility, but I wonder how much work load that would put on us moderators? Even if it had a flagged system similar to forum posts, someone would have to check and approve of that daily.

Requiring pre-approval adds a whole lot of UX challenges, and puts a ton of pressure on the moderators.

Probably a more likely solution would be an extended "white list" of approved relationship possibilities. More specificity, but not open ended.