Friends list & PMs broken

[VAN1SH1NG]

For many months the friends list and in-game PMs has been completely unreliable. PM system has become almost unusable because messages often are not received. All of a sudden I will get a message from someone that continues a thought and I will ask them about it. They tell me they sent other messages before that.

Friends list has numerous issues. It is rarely up to date. Often takes a long time before a player shows being in a server they join, seems like it tends to update on next map change. When players exit the game they usually remain online in friends list and in the server they were in when the left. Server list indicates friends are in empty servers when they are really offline.

I usually leave Altitude running for many hours at a time and I end having like 30 friends showing online when really only a few of them are. I have to restart the game to see who is actually online.

Often not receiving PMs is by far a bigger problem though.

This has been a constant problem for at least 6-8 months. I don't know if it could be affected by my friends list getting large. Currently at 194 friends.

[sunshineduck]

not a list size issue afaict, i have 280+ and have never seen an issue like that. i vaguely remember an issue with my friends list being underpopulated (like in this thread) but that was due to my internet connection

are you running the windows client?

[VAN1SH1NG]

Yes, Steam on Windows.

[Kafka]

I've noticed the same issue, at least with not updating which servers my friends are in... or saying they're still in the server I'm in after they have left.

Running standalone version on Mac OS X, so I think it's a minor bug, not OS-related.

[Slender]

My case is pretty much the same as ssd, 270+ friends and the only thing I've ever noticed is that when someone loses connection, it appears on ones friends list as though they are still in the server, but never happened anything like van is experiencing.

[VAN1SH1NG]

I did some testing locally today and was able to reproduce issues easily. Mostly happened randomly but there were some patterns. Tested using three different accounts (1 Steam, 2 other standalone with only a few friends) on 3 Windows machines. Seemed like all were experiencing the issues.

About 50% of the time one of these accounts logged in, the other account did not detect them as logged in. Additionally it seemed there was about 50% change upon either server join or map change that they would then appear online to the other accounts.

If a friend is actually online and sending you messages, but is not showing as online in your friends list you will never get them.

Also it seemed about 20% of the time a friend logs in and they show up in your friends list, you won't get messages they send you. Most of the time you do, but I still experienced a lot of missed messages.

It seemed like after the 1st message was received, there generally were no more problems. I didn't test this enough though to come to any conclusions.