Magic: the Gathering Arena added its long-anticipated Friends List feature in today’s 1.03.00 update. The feature allows you to add other players to a Friends List and easily send them direct challenge requests.
Sending a friend request on MTG Arena.
A Friends List has been one of the Magic community’s top feature requests for some time. In September, Wizards of the Coast announced that Friends Lists would be coming to MTG Arena in October, but then delayed the feature to focus on fixing the game’s degrading performance. In November, Wizards again announced that Friends Lists would be coming to MTG Arena that month…and then delayed it once more, citing performance concerns.
Those performance concerns seem to have been well-founded. In today’s patch notes, Wizards says that the Friends List feature was only seeing an 80% success rate when sending, receiving, and accepting friend requests in November. The development team improved the system to a 99.5% success rate during peak game hours in December, making Wizards comfortable enough to release the feature today.
