Parties, guilds, friends and presence

What it is#

A PlayerGroup is a party, a squad or a team — one type with a GroupPolicy that says how many fit, whether there are subgroups, who may invite and whether anybody may leave. A Guild is a roster over a rank ladder whose permissions are tag queries. A SocialGraph is one player's friends and blocks; a PresenceBook is who is online, redacted per viewer.

What it is for#

Every grouping a game has, and the two questions every one of them ends up asking: *who is in this* and *may they do that*.

Using it#

Compile a catalog into a SocialLibrary for the policies and charters, then make groups and guilds against them. Everything returns a refusal rather than throwing, because every one of these operations arrives from a client.

⚠ A non-empty group has exactly one leader, always, and leadership passes to the longest-standing remaining member. A leaderless group cannot invite, kick or disband — it is one an operator has to clean up — and "whoever is first in the list" is not a rule a client can predict.

⚠ Capacity counts the standing invites. A party of four with three invites out becomes a party of seven the moment they all accept.

⚠ A guild always has exactly one member at rank zero. Anything that would remove the last one is WouldStrand; the leader hands it over first, which SetRank(…, 0) does in one operation.

⚠ The top rank carries every permission whatever the charter said — a charter that forgot to give the leader Guild.Permission.Invite would otherwise brick every guild founded on it.

⚠ A block is one-way as a fact and two-way as a rule. Only one of them chose it, but the blocked player must not still be able to whisper, invite or trade.

⚠ Presence is redacted in the book rather than at the UI. An invisible player whose map went over the wire is one a packet capture can follow.

Reading one back#

Guild.Seat, Guild.Unseat and SocialGraph.Seat are the unchecked door state comes in through, and they are not player actions. HousePlot.Assign is the same seam for the same reason: Add asks a permission and SetRank asks who outranks whom, and a roster arriving from storage has nobody asking either. Replaying the checked calls instead would re-derive yesterday's state against today's content and quietly drop the standing a patch has since made illegal.

Three rules come with them, and each is a mistake the alternative makes:

⚠ A rank past the bottom rung lands on the bottom rather than being refused. A charter edited to remove a rung leaves every member who stood on it holding a rank the ladder no longer has, and refusing them would *delete those members* the next time the guild was read. Landing them at the bottom loses a rank; refusing them loses the player.

⚠ Seating does not keep the one-leader invariant, which nothing else in Guild breaks. Two at rank zero makes Leader answer with whichever the roster yields first. The caller is the authority precisely because it is the one that knows which is true, so it is the one that has to check.

⚠ A SocialTie is one value and not a set of flags, and seating one clears the other three. Block drops the friendship and both requests, so "blocked friend" is not a state this graph can be in — and a graph read back with somebody on two lists is one where the block's guarantee has already failed.

SocialGraph.Ties() is the way back out, in player order so that two realms holding the same graph write the same bytes.

Examples#

A raid squad:

Running one:

Asking whether somebody may do something:

What a viewer is told:

See also#

• Chat — which may not reference this, and why that is right.
• Gameplay tags — what a guild permission is.
• Requirements — the same algebra, one layer up.