Hey Guys! I want to shed some light on this. Though not the folks responsible for the friend challenge feature, I'm the one that brought up this bug due to reports of folks abusing this.
I think the major problem here is the uncertainty/clarity of information. We did not design this in terms of "act quick to accept and whoever accepts first goes first".
This is very abuse-able because its not information that is wide known or apparent (because it is a bug). Thus, there may be parties who are not aware of this.
In terms of community tournament use cases, if we want to add such a feature it will need to be blatantly apparent to both parties that it is a choice.
This can happen in several ways:
1) Note in friend challenge invites that whoever accepts first goes first and thereby turning this unintended behavior into a feature. This may still have problems as not everyone reads changes etc. One may argue this is on them for not paying attention :P, however as Devs we tend to think choices made unknowingly as bad design. Though sometimes we take this path because we can cover use cases with minimal tradeoffs.
2) Make it into an actual feature by having players choose who goes first. Now this takes time, trade offs etc etc. Time is finite. What are we giving up in the mean time? This is not for me to decide. The team that made Friend Challenge will need to look holistically at all of the features they are building and decided if this is something that should have this as an intended behavior.
In the meantime, I have chatted with the team about this and hopefully will have an update for you guys soon! Please give us some time to find the right way to solve this though.
NeoLexical
Hey Guys! I want to shed some light on this. Though not the folks responsible for the friend challenge feature, I'm the one that brought up this bug due to reports of folks abusing this.
I think the major problem here is the uncertainty/clarity of information. We did not design this in terms of "act quick to accept and whoever accepts first goes first".
This is very abuse-able because its not information that is wide known or apparent (because it is a bug). Thus, there may be parties who are not aware of this.
In terms of community tournament use cases, if we want to add such a feature it will need to be blatantly apparent to both parties that it is a choice.
This can happen in several ways:
1) Note in friend challenge invites that whoever accepts first goes first and thereby turning this unintended behavior into a feature. This may still have problems as not everyone reads changes etc. One may argue this is on them for not paying attention :P, however as Devs we tend to think choices made unknowingly as bad design. Though sometimes we take this path because we can cover use cases with minimal tradeoffs.
2) Make it into an actual feature by having players choose who goes first. Now this takes time, trade offs etc etc. Time is finite. What are we giving up in the mean time? This is not for me to decide. The team that made Friend Challenge will need to look holistically at all of the features they are building and decided if this is something that should have this as an intended behavior.
In the meantime, I have chatted with the team about this and hopefully will have an update for you guys soon! Please give us some time to find the right way to solve this though.