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Ian Chen avatar image
Ian Chen asked

Can we show friends' online status using PlayFab services?

Can we show friends' online status using PlayFab services?

I saw PlayFab party but not sure whether does it support this kind of feature.

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Rick Chen avatar image
Rick Chen answered

PlayFab Party is designed for a low-latency chat and data communication solution for cross-platform and cross-device multiplayer games. It is not recommended to be used as showing friends’ online status because a) there is a Party connectivity meter that is measured in player minutes connected to a network, and it could generate a big cost if you use it for this feature. b) The Party Networks that don’t have any authenticated users are automatically destroyed after a timeout, meaning if a group of friends leaves, they may have to create or join some other network next time and it would be hard to track the group of friends.

Currently there is no such feature in PlayFab to track a player’s online status. As discussed in this thread: https://community.playfab.com/questions/16003/friend-list-get-online-status-or-last-activity.html, it is not possible to do a real-time online status tracking system with PlayFab. What you could do is to write to a statistic in the player account once every five minutes or so, to use that statistic as a "timestamp". That way, you could use the data returned via the profile constraints to check if the player was online in that period.

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Ian Chen avatar image Ian Chen commented ·

Thanks for the clarification!

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