Being able to self invite yourself into a group (leader must accept it but he should be able stop the auto-invites if needed)
If you're friends with the group leader and they haven't disabled the setting, you can join their group without being invited.
Groups in their current form are not technically what you might think. A group isn't 'created'. Players simply set themselves as 'I am a group leader' and players can become part of that player's imaginary 'group'. The 'group ID' is just the owner's player ID. There is no data stored related to the group itself, it's stored against the leader's player ID. In fact, this is problematic, because if you change a 'group' setting such as /grff then transfer the group to another player (/grown) it won't transfer the settings.
I added this 'group' system as an interim crew system to allow for group chat and a friendly fire setting. It was never meant to be a replacement for the crew system.
I
do want to add the proper crew system one day (I've put too much work into it not to..), however I have a technical predicament related to it. It's not something I've figured out a solution to yet.
I don't want to spend time and effort turning the chatgroup system into more of a halfway house towards the crew system. I don't even know if I'll have both systems side by side. If I do, you'll either be able to be in a crew or a group, but groups will be limited functionally.
The dilemma I've yet to solve with the crew system is that I want the server to control the prefixing of crew tags to player names. That means your account name will be e.g. 'Mike' but if you're in the [MCNR] crew, the server will add the [MCNR] tag to your name when you join. Or you can join with it already on, no difference.
The issue comes with existing accounts - what if 'Mike' and '[MCNR]Mike' both exist as player accounts? Which one becomes 'Mike'? Makes most sense that the 'Mike' one does, but what do we do about the '[MCNR]Mike' account? My intention is that joining with a crew tag will just make you sign into the tag-less account. For example if I join with '[MCNR]Mike' I'll just be logging into 'Mike'.
I guess if I join as '[MCNR]Mike' and 'Mike' exists, I'll have to tell them they either need to sign into 'Mike' or change their account name... I just need to work out the details. I don't want to run the risk of alienating people from their accounts, or confusing the register/login process.
I'm also slightly aprehensive about pushing crews to be more of an 'official' thing, as some argue it will have a negative impact on other players, especially solo players or those in small crews. But I guess having the crew system isn't _really_ going to make more people play in a crew.. if they already play as a crew they already use groups or whatever.
So yeah, there's my brain dump for anyone that asks about crews for the next 50 years.
I want to do it, but I'm worried about its implementation and impact.
I'll move this to rejected for now as none of these ideas are new to me.
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