Update Friends (coming soon)

Hey Guys and Gals,

We are still working on campaigns and hope to have something out in the next 2 weeks, but have some time now so we wanted to take a crack at knocking out "friends" for FRHD which we expect to release early next week.

Bit of a back story on why we are adding friends, one of funnest moments I have had with Free Rider HD was pre-launch when every track leaderboard was a "friend" leaderboard as we were just testing internally at the office, with friends and family. So when Ira or Char posted there best times on the leaderboard, I had a blast crushing their times (you know because I am a way better racer than them ) and knowing that they were struggling to re-take the best time.

Now the world leaderboards are full of awesome riders such as Pityboy Mr_Snoogley Asierro Hashplant etc and an amateur like myself has a way to go before I can compete on their level, while their runs are awesome to watch they are pretty de-motivating competitively as I am no where close to their level.

Our hope with Friends is that it will add a whole new dynamic to FRHD, one that we experienced in the early days when testing with friends, where it will be much easier to form rivalries with people you may know or who you consider friends, which should also be more gratifying when you smash their best time.

OK, so to how we are thinking Friends will work (feedback would be appreciated!):

• players can send friend requests by username
• players can accept + decline friend requests
• max friends of 25 (we may grow this out, but we would like "friends" to be real friends / people you are playing with to make leaderboards / rivalries more meaningful, we would like to avoid players spamming friend requests to race who has the most friends, 1000's of friends in FRHD would be kind of pointless, feedback on this number would be appreciated)
• per track Friend Leaderboard
• Notifications when friends post a better time than you on a track
• there will be anti-spam features in place to prevent players from over sending requests
• a little further down the road
  • daily achievements for beating x friend times / racing x ghosts

If you have feedback, suggestions or comments let us know.

 

'etc'

 

What do you think would be an appropriate number of friends?

Right now we have a per track all-time best leaderboard that takes the best times from everyone in the game (that will remain as is) but we will be adding a Friend Leaderboard where if your friend has completed the track their best time will show, so basically like the leaderboard that exists now but will only show your friends best times.