Board Thread:Suggestions and Ideas/@comment-26338521-20150430033531/@comment-14600979-20150501233643

Okay.

Well, the QR situation has been discussed already. Eventually the servers will become inaccessible. Hopefully when that happens Smileboom will allow us to access the source code in some other way. It's a risk everone has to take when programming for it.

The difference between having to be friends and allowing free communication isn't so much laziness but the convenience in staying in one app. Even when it isn't a problem to go to the home menu, register each other, go back, and perform whatever operation is needed is PTC, simply keeping a large enough roster of friends to be able to play when you want isn't easy. There would still be that communication of asking them somewhere "hey, let's play a SmileBasic game" that would restrict the usefulness. In fact, it would ruin the point of having chat programs. Plus, if it were me, I wouldn't want to have to ask Kouyama and the rest of the Japanese community to exchange friend code for the chance that I be able to play with them at some point. I would rather have better chances of actually playing online games than being confined to whomever I already know and are therefore "safe." Ah, yes, now I remember. When I was child in Soviet Russia, mine only friends were the ones I went to labor camp with to build missile for destroying capitalist. (No offense to any Russians, communists, Marxist communists, or anyone else trying to be offended. I don't mean to imply that was the policy of any particular country.  I just like non-standard examples.)  Oh, but right, if I want to play multiplayer игра в Чапаева with THEM, I can just meet up and do local.

Besides, why not implement it as a choice? Just have a method of checking whether a system in a multiplayer connection is a friend and then the developer can decide what to do with it. For example, in-game chat being restricted to friends, and preferring to join games with friends.

But really, it doesn't matter the logistics of it, because Smileboom has decided not to include online play. There isn't much we can do about that and their reasons are much greater than children's online safety, which is easy enough to waive.