question

[Updated: Clarifying update frequency for values]

Yes, for many clicker games, the "money" isn't a VC or a statistic, since they want to be able to show the player as having values that can't be stored in 32 (or even 128) bits. There are some opensource "big number" libraries available online, or you could create your own. The simplest thing would be to store them as part of player save data, in a key/value pair with other relevant data about the player's game state. You would track this on the client (or a dedicated server), and periodically update the service-side data with the latest values - say, once a minute or so, though you'll occasionally need to do an early update due to a significant change. For example, if the player spends a "hard" Virtual Currency - one that can only be obtained with real money, or via rare opportunities in the in-game play (like Gold Bars in AdCap), you'll want to update the player's save with the modifiers purchased/applied. But for the rolling balance, and for purchases of new "shops" (again, using AdCap as the example), those are things you can just track locally and only sync to the service when needed, or when a significant amount of time has passed.

If your concern is specifically around having a statistic for comparisons between players, you would need to have a way to represent that which does fit within an int32, such as recording them based upon exponent or some similar factor (depending on the granularity you want to have).

For your leagues, it is possible to create a segment of "all users" and then query it using GetPlayersInSegment. Just set MaxBatchSize to 0, and you'll get back the count of profiles. However, I do believe that what you require is something more specific to your title's needs, since you need to have a way to "bucketize" players into groups - and preferably only active players, presumably. For that, I would recommend using an external database to track the bucketization for now. We will be providing a clan/guild system later in the year, which may address this need, depending on your requirements.

And yes, for a two-way (confirmed) friend request system, you could use Shared Group Data for that: https://community.playfab.com/questions/370/206712537-Two-way-friend-confirmation-with-Cloud-Script.html. To find friends, you could use Client/GetAccountInfo to look up players by username, email address, or title display name (as well as PlayFab ID).