It is currently too hard to manage selective join permissions for individual friends. While I can turn off joins for everyone in my privacy settings, I am unable to restrict join access to a specific few within my friends list. For example, I might want all friends except for one or two individuals to be able to join me, but there is currently no option to customize join settings to this level of detail.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience and enjoyment because it would allow me more control over who can join my sessions when Iâm working on games, testing, or simply playing. This would create a smoother workflow, as I would not need to fully restrict all friends from joining or manually manage my friends list every time I want a selective group to join.
Use Case Examples:
During private testing, I may want only a select group of friends to join me while excluding a few who may be less relevant to the current session.
While working on personal projects, having selective join control would allow me to prevent interruptions without impacting my general friend list or privacy settings.
When enjoying a game casually, I may prefer to keep my session limited to only a few close friends, avoiding potential interruptions from a larger friend group without blocking everyone entirely.
If this title or a similar one already exists, I apologize I wasnât able to find it.
In short, a simple âexclude specific friendsâ toggle in the existing join settings could be an effective solution.
Is there any reason why you mention excluding specific friends rather than including (IE: blacklisting rather than whitelisting), given the general use-cases; I would assume the latter would be more convienient, especially if someone accepts your friend request while you are in-game?
The idea of an âexclude listâ seemed more intuitive to me for cases where I only want to restrict a specific subset of friends while keeping the default join permissions open for the rest. However, youâre right that an âinclude-onlyâ list (whitelisting) could offer even more granular control, especially if I want to invite only a specific few into certain sessions without restricting everyone else.
What Iâm looking for is the ability to prevent or allow certain friends to join me in specific situations. Both options would be incredibly useful depending on the context.
Iâm already aware that this feature exists, but what Iâm referring to is the ability to allow or block some friends from joining generally on my friends list, not just within the VIP Server menu.
I think Iâve explained it simply.
For example, when both Person A and Person B are on my friends list, I want the setting to allow Person B to join me to be enabled, while the setting for Person A should be disabled.
The problem I see with blacklisting rather than whitelisting friends to join is that it creates a slight vulnerability depending on your use case. If you have any pending friend requests, someone could accept one at any point in time, and since you are using a blacklist rather than a whitelist; they could easily join your game. This likely makes it more annoying than a whitelist for most of the example cases you listed, which is why I was wondering why a whitelist may not be preferable.
More importantly, though, there are many other cases (such as private experiences under NDA, etc.) where a blacklist feature would make their use-case outright infeasible. My worry is that some users may not even see this vulnerability and do it anyway, only to end up in legal trouble over it; ideally features shouldnât have built-in âvulnerabilitiesâ for reasons like this.
You havenât read the messages above; the feature Iâm talking about and requesting has nothing to do with the VIP Server Menu. Please read other comments before posting.
