So we are currently working on a clan feature for our game and we've hit a wall in terms of searching for clans by name. I've already seen that the clan search feature is being worked on and "should" be finished Q1, but we really want a contingency in case it does not come out before our release.
So the temporary work around we have is to use cloudscript to create public groups and then populate title data with a list of those group ids. The script will check group member size at the same time and prune any groups that are full from the list. The player will not be able search for groups, but they will be able to see public ones and can still look up user created groups by id.
As far as title data limitations - this script should run on a timer, rather than be triggered from a user action, so that only one thing is modifying title data at a time. We also want way more groups in the list than required (in the 1000s) so that if groups fill up before the script can prune them, we can still pull more from the list and the built in title data delay shouldn't matter much. Hopefully this should provide the illusion of public groups, at least until the search functionality is in.
Does this seem like a reasonable solution for the time being? We know that we'll need a private vertical to be able to support the api calls that we want.
Unrelated to this - is there a way currently or in the future to make group names non unique? The Create Group documentation suggests that they must be unique by default, but I can't find anywhere in the dashboard to toggle that. We have some workarounds, but I assume the group search feature will operate on group name, in which case we will definitely need to be able to create non unique group names.
