My Friends list filled up for the second time today. It first filled up about 3 weeks ago. At the time I was annoyed, but I had some guys on there I had not played with in years so I removed them and freed up about 8 spots on my friends list. Today, when I went to add another Rainbow Six: Vegas player I got a message saying it was full again. Now I’m pretty upset. All of the people on my friends lists are either close personal friends, people I play regularly with, or members of a Rainbow Six: Vegas league that I play in. The majority of the people on my list are AGE (Adult Gaming Enthusiasts) members. They are either in the Rainbow Six: Vegas League with me or people I play Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas with during the Weekly AGE Game Nights. Every Tuesday is Gears of War and every Thursday is Rainbow Six: Vegas. So, how do I choose who to delete? I know I’m not the only one with this dilemma because we’ve been discussing it over on the AGE Forums for some time.

Having a full Friends List brings a few problems. First is the obvious, who do I delete to make room for new friends. This is getting harder and harder to decide as I slowly whittle down my list to people who I play with regularly. Any given night I probably have 30 to 40 of my friends playing online. How do I remove guys from my list that I play with on a regular basis?

The second problem is one of organization. It can be hard, especially late at night, to remember exactly which friend has which games and who prefers to play what. As a result I end up inviting people to play Gears of War when they only have Rainbow Six: Vegas, and vise versa. Sure, it is only a minor annoyance, but one that could be easily remedied. There are multiple ways it could be resolved. Allow for Friends to be tagged/categorized and then sorted those tags. Or, add a folder system where I can make folders of “Friends,” “AGE GoW,” and “AGE RS:V.” Then I could put the friends on my list into the corresponding folder and keep track of them easily that way. Either of these simple enhancements would take care of this issue.

The final problem is one of bandwidth. When I have 30 or 40 friends online and I’m trying to go through and invite, or message, those playing a specific game it can take a few seconds for each name to pull up. Multiply this by 30 or 40 and it can take a couple minutes for the list to completely populate. A lot of this delay has to do with the speed of my DSL, but only one speed of DSL is offered where I live. I know that I’m not the only one who has this problem. It seems pretty common for those of us who have a larger friends list and a generic DSL connection.

I know Microsoft keeps stats of what the average number of friends people have on their Friends List. They don’t give the exact number, but it is reportedly less that 20. I can believe that, but using that statistic to determine how best to enhance the Friends List does nothing to help those of us who are most active in Xbox Communities and have larger Friends Lists.

Microsoft, please, find a way to streamline the Friends Lists so that they can have over 100 people and add some organizational tools.