/bcl friend

[Foxite]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Many public servers allow players to create a "team" or "group". It would be nice if a personal chunkloader could be registered to the user's team, so that they would work if any member of that team is online, rather than the user who placed the chunkloader.

Describe the solution you'd like
Since there probably isn't a standardized teams API, and supporting individual plugins/mods is infeasible, I think the best solution is to let the player add friends via a /bcl command. A player's personal chunkloaders will also be activated if a friend is online.

3rd party plugins/mods should be able to read/modify the list of friends, which would allow 3rd party plugins/mods to sync bcl's friends list to their own solutions, and make the whole system easier to use.

BCL friendship should require the consent of both players, otherwise someone could significantly drain server resources by friending everyone on the server, which would lead to people abusing this feature to make their personal chunkloaders effectively world chunkloaders, especially on popular servers.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The next alternative to this feature is to support individual plugins/mods. That's counter-intuitive to me, I think 3rd party teams plugins should support BCL, possibly through a separate mod that talks to BCL and the teams plugin.

Additional context
If possible, please backport this feature to 1.12.2 versions of BCL :)

If this won't be implemented only because nobody has time to do so, I'll gladly create a bounty to incentivize it. :D

[KasperFranz]

This is an interesting idea,

I think there are a few items that need to be considered before this gets implemented.

I think it would make more sense to create "Teams" and do it that way.
With teams, you would also be able to limit how many can be in a team.

Before looking more into this I think it would be getting more feedback on this.

Is this something server owners want?
What kind of limiting factors do we need? (e.g. a team can only be x people)

Since Sponge 7 is 1.12 it will be created for that.

[keag-dev]

As an alternative, why not allow players to add others to their existing chunkloaders.
Ex.
Player 1 places and configures a chunkloader.
Player 2 right clicks the loader, maybe a GUI option to request access to this loader
Player 1 gets a chat notification (or something)
Player 2 has a loader removed from their balance (configurable)
Now the loader works for both players

That way, even if they create a loader and give the whole server access to it, it still costs each player 1 loader to do so.

This also means that players can have loaders that are shared, as well as loaders that are private (I think this would result in less loaded chunks if only one player from a "team" is online)