Roblox Best Friends feature come-back

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to spend time with a small hand of people when trying to take a break from working and explore other experiences on Roblox.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I have a few people added in my friends list but I don’t want them to always join me.

With Roblox’s upcoming updates announced at RDC 2023, regarding calls, and other great communication between users improvements, I thought this might be the right moment to post this.


(RDC 2023 Footage)

In modern Roblox’s Standards, many developers might not find this feature very useful at as it is, but take a moment and read this post to see a few features I personally think would improve the Roblox experience, and why I think it’s needed.

Short story, I have a small group of people I usually enjoy spending my time with, and a larger group of people which I work with, but some times, those people part that I’ve got added on Roblox because of work/business sometimes join me on Roblox without any notice, and I don’t always enjoy that.

Back in early 2010s, we used to have a feature called “Best Friends” which was renamed to friends, when followers feature just released.
I would like to make a request for this best friends feature to come back, and I will explain in this post why.

At the moment we only have “Friends, Followers & Following”

  • Following users are most likely people we look up to or we follow them because they’re doing some cool things we like
  • Followers are users that usually look up to us, or liked one of our contents we published on Roblox
  • Friends are people we sometimes spend time with/or people we have connections to.

So, now, we have no way of separating these the friends we want to join us in games and the friends we don’t want to join us in games.

For example, I want my best friends to always be able to join me, see what I play, Etc, without having to always turn on my joins for them, because I’m always in mood to spend time with them. However, I don’t always want my other friends to be able to follow me in games/see what I play, and there’s really nothing that could separate both.

Some may say “Turn on your joins when you want friends to join and turn them off when you don’t”, or “Unfriend people you don’t want to play with”

First of all, I don’t mind having those people added, and sometimes I enjoy playing games with them, but other times I just want to play with my small group of friends I play with everyday, without having to always go in the settings menu to turn my joins off. Having an option to simply add some people as best friends would make things easier.

I understand there might be limitations to the Roblox website regarding friends lists/user relationships (eg followings, followers, blocked people, muted people, friends etc.), so maybe we could have a limit of 5-20 best friends max?
And I also understand, having to implement a new feature such as this might take a while because of how much the Roblox website on only a few user relationship types.

The best friends list could also be hidden from public in order to save website resources.

Developers could use this feature to award in-experience bonuses such as “multiplier boosts” for playing with best friends.

Another benefit to this, would be that we could also use this best friends list to allow our friends to use models, decals, audios, videos and other assets without having them to add us in their game’s team create, or we could even have them receive admin commands in our games without having to add their usernames/userids to the games.

We could as well, use this best friend feature, to only allow our best friends to listen/speak with us In-experiences via microphones :studio_microphone:

I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of other ideas from the Roblox community as of why they would want this feature to be brought back, and Hopefully if enough people give very good reasons for this feature, we might receive it back!

If you want this feature to return, please add a reply with reasons why you think this would be a good feature, if you don’t think it would be good, add a reply with reasons why so Roblox engineers and staff can take this into consideration and come up with a new (or returning) great feature to the website!

Here’s a few examples or mockups of what the best friends option would appear in a few places

Privacy/Settings:


I definitely believe an overhaul of the privacy settings is needed, and having more features added like invisible mode, DnD mode, streaming mode, enabling/disabling verification Icon without losing permanent access to it, and a lot more, but I will keep this post for friends-list only

Profile page:


(remove from best friends)

(add to best friends)

(alternate picture for adding/removing best friends

For the leaderbaoard icon we could either have the normal friends icon, or something more special similar to this:

image
image

(friend with a heart)

image
image
(friend with a star)

In this post I explained a lot more benefits this feature would bring to the Roblox Platform than I would personally be needing, but there’s a lot of developers out there that might need those features, so I decided suggesting what Best friends could be used for.

95 Likes

First of all, I love how you added visuals for how the features you recommended could appear on the website.

In my opinion, it’s a pretty cool idea and they should totally bring it back. It would help to differentiate “friends” and friends that you actually enjoy playing and talking with.

23 Likes

i loved best friends feature :rofl: i liked to see all the profile statuses of people it was like a way to keep in touch with people and see what was happening

11 Likes

In my opinion, Roblox should add a “Mutual Friends” feature whenever you click on someone’s profile.

14 Likes

This already exists in the Universal App, under the username it tells you how many mutual friends and what mutual friends you have with them

6 Likes

I think the idea is very good, since it would separate acquaintances with true friends, this would help a lot to avoid bad times, we will not always be comfortable playing with acquaintances, much less having them enter our experiences without prior notice, I have several friends They are popular, they have many friends and every time, many of them always join, but sometimes my popular friends just want to play with their best friends, and avoid acquaintances since in a matter of attention, the discard is felt in the group, excuse my English, I don’t speak English.

9 Likes

this is actually a great idea, specially catched my attention with the privacy setting, fully support this

4 Likes

As someone who friends both co-workers and actual close friends on Roblox, I’d make great use of this, and could definitely see many of my friends making use of it too.

People whom I’m working with temporarily don’t need to see everything I’m doing, so I’ve opted to pretty much close down my privacy settings. I’d love to be able to open those back up to my actual friends.

4 Likes

+1
would LOVE for this feature to make a comeback

6 Likes

Please, make this a reality. I have a select few friends that I want to join me, right now there is no option close to this so I am forced to use the privacy option “no one”

5 Likes

This idea is great and really useful, the best friends feature’s return would be a great addition to the privacy settings, as me myself want to keep my joins to a select friends at some times.

The visuals for the feature posted on the post itself is also great concept art!

4 Likes

Agree, it would be great to have specific friends be able to join you.

3 Likes

+1 on this suggestion, best friend option should be added so we don’t have all our friends trying to join when you’re only wanting to play with 1/2 friends.

not sure why this isn’t already added.

3 Likes

Hey with all the new friends api changes and RDC 2024 stuff, I decided to re-ping this post and hopefully soon this might get some attention? Would be nice to have best friends feature return, or something similar, where we could only choose a few people from our friends list to be able to join us in experiences at all times!

3 Likes

Seems like it’s already in the works in the form of party’s. Announce in rdc24

1 Like

still not 1:1 best friends functionality though SADLY
bump. still needed

This would work well now because of announcement that roblox is increasing the friend limit to 1000.

2 Likes

Wouldn’t be the same thing, because the joins would still be private and people I’d like to see what I play couldn’t see it. the main reason behind this update would be to allow certain friends to see what I play and join me if they want to, and hide what I play from others. I’ve got certain friends that join me in every game and they’re pestering or annoying sometimes, while others are quite can be pleasant and calming, and I’d be happy letting them join me anytime.

Being on this topic, I also suggest adding privacy settings with WHO can add you to team create from your friends list :slight_smile:

2 Likes

if you dont want other friends to join you then turn your joins off. its really not that hard

To be completely fair for the:

This button exists:
IMG_0885
However if u dont want to for whatever reason then yes having a best friends feature wouldn’t be a bad idea

I would add aswell a ‘who can join me among the users in my friends list’ option because maybe among those best friends there’s a non best friend u still want to be able to join u but aren’t best friends also if u just want to allow a player to join u wether friend or not i think that’d also be useful