Hello friends. Many people who sent me a friends request in the past couple weeks have been greeted by the following message

“Cannot send the Friend request because of the recipient’s status (E-82202905)”

This message irritates me to no end. People think that I have all friend requests blocked and some even think it’s a block on them personally and not just a universal block.  Sony has decided to use this as the error message you get when you send a friend request to a person with a full friends list. However, the message comes across as if it’s something I set within my settings menu to block people.  And this couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is a common sight when you have to many friends

As you all know, I have publicly put out my PSN name on several of my YouTube videos and even here on my About Me page. I started with a video from Resogun and then did it again in Outlast. I set out to fill my 2,000 friend list cap with all my YouTube fans and I did exactly that. I have 2,000 fans on my friends list. However, having the maximum number of friends has brought with it several inconveniences. The sheer number of PSN messages I get is NOT one of them. With the exception of a week here or there, I typically have responded to all fan messages.  I’ll get back to the full friends status complaint I have in a moment. The inconveniences I speak of here  is the disorderly way that the friends list is presented to me.

The only option of viewing is alphabetical. So if your name starts with “A’ or “B”, I can pretty easily pull you up. If your name starts with “X”, which is one of the most common first letters in a PSN name, I’ll never find you. Sure, I can just do a search, but I don’t remember all 2,000 friends names (sorry, my memory is not that good).  The reason I won’t find you is that I can’t just scroll down the list because it doesn’t load the entire thing., plus it takes over 90 seconds to scroll the whole thing.  Never mind the fact that because of its size, I get my own unique error message (E-8220220B) which is an error retrieving the Friends list (who didn’t see that coming).  Before people ask, I have a 50Mbps hardwired internet connection that is as rock solid as they come and the issue never happens on my other account or from my iPhone app on the same network. I can’t even sort by last time logged in….because there is no sorting!!  If I could see who hasn’t logged in the past two months, I could delete them and add someone else. Hell, you CAN sort screenshots by both name and last played…WTF.

Does this look like my friends list is full, or me being a dick?

So let me get back to the error message about my status that you see when you send me a Friends Request. If you saw that message about my status, and were you are unable to send me a Friend Request, what would you think? I can tell you what you wouldn’t think. You would never in a million years think that it’s because my friends list is full (who would have 2,000 friends?).  The sheer number of messages I have gotten from people asking me why my status says that, or if I can send them a request myself because they are unable to indicates to me that the error message needs to be better explained. As I’ve mentioned, I like to reply to my PSN messages (when possible) and I’ve had to create my own copy/paste response to these types of messages which are 10-15 a day.  Thank thankfully these people reach out and I can interact with them.  How many more people aren’t reaching out to me after seeing that message and just thinking that I’m an asshole or something. This is not something I want. Sony needs to put the blame on their software restrictions and not present it in a way that it reflects poorly on me, their paying customer.  Just tell people that the request won’t go through because the recipient’s list is full. Is it that hard?  In fact, it should be known before they take the time to craft out a custom friend request message only to realize they wasted a few minutes writing out a beautiful friend request message because it’ll never get to me.

Lets take it a step further. Allow me, the paying customer, to be able to create an auto-reply to anyone sending a friend request once my list if full. And if they typed in a message, deliver it to my inbox so I can still read it. This way, instead of saying, “Cannot send the Friend request because of the recipient’s status,” I can have it say,“I’m sorry, my friends list is currently full, but my PSN message inbox never is, so consider writing a message and I will read it”.  Which one of these rejections is better for my friends who can’t get through?

These are just a couple things that have really bothered me about Sony’s attempt to be more social. The fact is, as my friends list grew, I had to become considerably less social. If I’m playing a game and would like to reach out to anyone playing that same game, forget about it. There’s no way to bring up a list of people currently playing that game. Even though the list of current friends online is far fewer than 2,000, I still have 300-600 friends online at any given moment and I have that same problem of not being able to scroll through the list. The PSN Friends app on the PS4  needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed sooner than later. You can’t claim you’re social when you throw a big house party and you have to go lock yourself up in a closest as soon as to many guests start arriving.

Quick list of other complaints (Drop a comment below with yours)

• Needs bulk name request deletion.
• Needs folders that you can group types of friends (real life, clan members, family, etc)
• Online/Offline notifications AND allow it to be set by folder so I only see when real life friends log in but not when clan members log in
• Expand Search to  include current friends only that searches their PSN name, real name or current game played.
• Needs to be able to scroll through lists by quick access links that let you scroll directly to a specific letter. (It takes me a minute and a half to scroll to the “Z’s”)
• And somewhat related, allow deletion of messages on the iPhone app and a setting to disallow being part of group messages without first approving it.