Hey guys, this is a topic that's been a problem since the dawn of the game, but I'm going to bring it up again. The friend system in FFBE is... really bad and needs some updates.

So I'll start with a story about how my Saturday went. This weekend I wanted to do a few YouTube videos showcasing Nier units. I asked a friend to build me a custom 2B for the Asura 3* fight, then about 2:00pm I sat down to look for her. I reset the app a few times trying to find her, but she wasn't offered. Also, I hadn't played FFBE since about 5 hours earlier, so she definitely wasn't on cooldown.

After about four app resets, I started to manually run earth shrine, picking random friends to force them on cooldown to increase the chances of the specific friend I needed to show up. I did that for about 30 minutes, never finding the specific friend I was looking for. Then I decided to ask a few other people to set up a custom 2B for me to increase my chances. Unrelated to this issue, but most of them didn't do the build I asked for properly (love you all anyway), so I couldn't use them, though one did, so now I had two properly built friends I was looking for.

Back to earth shrine, and from about 2:30pm until 3:00pm I picked random friends to force them on cooldown while trying to find one of the two properly built 2B's on my list. Never saw either. At 3:00pm I started streaming my earth shrine runs in discord just for the lols, and some people joined to hang out and suffer with me as I kept running earth shrine to find the specific friend(s). We streamed earth shrine runs forcing friends on cooldown for another hour until about 4:00pm, and not once did either of the two friends I wanted show up (they showed up in other slots, but the 2B of theirs, which was set in slot 1, never showed).

After two hours of this dumbness, never finding either of the friends, I ran out of time and had to leave for something IRL. Later that evening I sat down again to try to do the same video, and went back to earth shrine to look for one of the two properly built friends. From 10:20pm until 11:45pm I did the same manual earth shrine runs forcing other friends on cooldown trying to find the custom friends I needed. Finally, after a grand total of about 3.5 hours of earth shrine, the friend I needed finally appeared in slot 1 with the proper 2B build, so I took her and made the video I wanted to make.

Now, that story was probably longer than it needed to be to make my point, but it should demonstrate how trash the friend system in FFBE is and always has been. You might want to tell me "just slim down your friend list" because I'm at about 160 friends. While yes, that probably would make finding specific friends easier, I tried that and while scrolling through my 160'ish friends to purge down the list, I realized that basically every single person on my friend list is someone I added through a personal connection on discord, reddit, or youtube, so I didn't want to remove any of them (and every one of them is an active player, I always remove people when they go inactive for 7 days).

Once in the past Global stepped in and made an improvement to the friends system by allowing us to add a unit of our own in the sixth friend slot, but this feature is only active on chamber of the fallen (old trials) and chamber of vengeance. We can't use this feature on newer trials (12-type takedown) or on other content (like the 3* esper fights).

The fact that Global has once before made improvement to the friend system shows that they can do something when they want to. My request is for the Global team to at the very least enable us to take our own sixth unit as a friend slot on all trial content (like 12-type takedown, and the future grace of element trials), or even better overhaul the friend system entirely like adding a refresh button, or any other of the hundreds of ways it could be improved.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been driven mad at how bad the friend system in FFBE can be when looking for a unit for a trial and being unable to find the 1-3 properly built units on your list.

Not directly related to this issue, but since it's a post about the friend system I'll bring it up here too. Global should also fix the issue of inactive accounts (or accounts with a maxed request list) being offered as a friend to newer players, which causes them to constantly run into "friend list full" errors when they try to send a request to add a friend. At the very least, change or remove the new player quest to "add a friend" which is what causes those headaches for new players as they get stuck on that one and unable to complete it without going outside of game to ask for a friend add on social media.

TLDR:

• Please add "take your own unit" to all trial content instead of only some
• Make finding specific friends on your list easier
• Don't offer players an unfriended unit unless their list has room for a friend request