100 Friends Cap

[Bilkokuya]

For those who don't have an xbox account, or haven't reached that stage yet, xbox live has a friends limit of 100, meaning you have to be selective about who you add as a contact.

Now a few things instantly spring up as an issue about this - firstly, that having a limit on the friends list, after paying a rather high figure per month to use these features, is a complete rip-off - surely the extra entries in the xbox database that this would cause wouldn't detract from their profits to a noticeable extent. Anyway, the other main problem I have with it is that if you wish to get a full server running on almost any game, you need a full active friends list to find enough players - detracting from the entire experience of xbox live.

Anyway, I don't know how true this is, but I've heard two main theories as to why the limit is imposed: The first, being that they can't help it - the friends list technology they use was designed for Halo2 and cannot support more than 100 friends. However, I'd have to question this, as xbox have released multiple full system updates since then, each one with the opportunity to rectify the problem.
The other main theory is that it's for our own protection, following the idea of "dunbar's number" (150), which argues that throughout history it can be seen that no social group can survive with more than 150 people as the human brain can't remember everybody's relationship to each other in enough detail. Now, this could be true to an extent, that once you have a large friends list, you will start to lose contact with certain friends and so it's a waste of time having such a large list. But surely, it's down the to gamers who pay for these accounts to decide when they can and can't accept any more invites, not down to microsoft.

Anyway, thanks for reading and please discuss and debate your opinions and thoughts on this matter. Hopefully one day the limit will be removed.

Bilkokuya

[1UPGamer]

I didn't know of the limit and I think for 99% of people they'll never really get close to that limit. I mean 100+ friends is gonna get spammy and weird. Almost like my MSN IM list, got loads of people that I don't really know anymore or even would contact ever... If there was a limit on it, I'd certainly be pruning those a little more often.

[Primeval]

I know when I used to play on xbl I only had about 30-35 friends. And even that was hard to remember the people.