In the upcoming patch, we will be introducing game invites! One thing dagnor and I had trouble deciding on was how long an invite should last for. So what do you think? This game is for the players, so why not let you decide! Please vote above and feel free to leave a post explaining why certain options are good/bad ideas

Without having tried the system yet this is my opinion based on experience with other games. The only thing I'm not sure of yet is what the invite is for? I will assume, for now, that the invite takes you into a private game lobby (i.e. the invite is for a private game).

An invite stays open until one of the following happens:

1) The invite is accepted
2) The invite is declined
3) The client is closed
4) The game lobby that the invite was designed for no longer exists (i.e. the game has started, the lobby was closed)

you are correct, although theres a 5th situation: it times out. We dont want invites to just linger there forever, so we want a small time limit on it -- especially if we need to add anti-spam features later (we talked about only have one invite out at a time, among other things, however this will not be the case for now at least)

So this poll is just to see how long people think the invites should last before they time out. For example, in starcraft 2, it's 2 minutes. In League of Legends, the invite notifications are different but because of that, they dont have a timer. However, since this is a pop-up window similar to starcraft 2, we agreed that a timer was a good idea for it

People often go AFK and you would generally like them to see the invite when they get back. If a time limit must be imposed, I would say no less than 10 minutes. But that's just my opinion.

Its probably not a big deal anyhow though, even if its shorter. I don't play Starcraft 2 so I have no idea how the invites work or why they would need to have a short time delay.

My thinking is that if you send someone an invite and they happened to go AFK for five minutes, it is convenient if when they return from AFK they can simply join. Otherwise, when they return they will need to PM the person (if they are even aware an invite was sent) and then receive another one. Having invites time out quick will lead to more private messages if the person missed it. I'm a lazy gamer and like invites to stay for awhile.

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As for the anti-spam I propose a different solution. Create a setting to block invites from a certain user and a second setting to block invites from anyone who is not on "your" friends list.

EDIT: Oh, you will allow multiple invites to be sent at a time... ok. I still propose the above anti-spam solution. But it seems like you should only get one invite at a time, with a later invite replacing an earlier one.

This will eventually be added but not right now. It'll probably wait one or two patches. We're trying to avoid beefing up the options menu a whole lot, but eventually we'll have a lot of extra options related to notifications, invites, friends, etc