Context

Hello brainCloud team,

We are designing a follow/friend system for our game and would like to confirm a few details before implementation.

Our intended model is:

We maintain our own FOLLOW Custom Entity as the source of truth. A game “friend” is defined only when two users follow each other mutually. When mutual follow is established, we plan to call FriendService.AddFriends([targetProfileId]). When either side unfollows, we plan to call FriendService.RemoveFriends([targetProfileId]). We may later use brainCloud Friends as an optimized source for social leaderboards. Questions 1. Friend Relationship Direction

Are AddFriends and RemoveFriends bidirectional for internal brainCloud friends?

If user A calls AddFriends([B]), will B also see A in ListFriends("brainCloud")? Will both A and B see each other in GetSocialLeaderboard results if they both have leaderboard scores? If A calls RemoveFriends([B]), is the friend relationship removed from both users? 2. Idempotency

Are AddFriends and RemoveFriends idempotent?

What happens if AddFriends([B]) is called when A and B are already friends? What happens if RemoveFriends([B]) is called when they are not friends? 3. Consistency and Caching

Are friend changes immediately visible?

After AddFriends or RemoveFriends, should ListFriends("brainCloud") and GetSocialLeaderboard reflect the change immediately? Or is there any eventual consistency or caching delay we should expect? 4. Friend Count Limits

Is there a hard or recommended limit for the number of brainCloud friends per user?

We could not find a documented hard cap. Are there practical performance limits we should design around? 5. GetSocialLeaderboard Behavior With Many Friends

How does GetSocialLeaderboard behave when a user has many friends?

Does it return all recognized friends plus self, with no paging or limit? Is there any hidden maximum result count or payload limit? Are pacers included in this result as well? 6. Recommended API for Top-N Friend Leaderboards

What is the recommended API for a top-N friends leaderboard?

Can we use GetMultiSocialLeaderboard([leaderboardId], leaderboardResultCount, replaceName) with a single leaderboard ID? Is leaderboardResultCount applied after social filtering and score sorting? Is there a maximum allowed value for leaderboardResultCount? Is this API preferred over GetSocialLeaderboard when we only need the top 50 friends? 7. Social Leaderboard Pagination

Is regular pagination supported for social leaderboards?

We found GetGlobalLeaderboardPage for global leaderboards, but did not find an equivalent offset/page API for social leaderboards. Is there any supported way to retrieve friend leaderboard entries 51-100, 101-150, etc., without requesting all prior entries? 8. Billing and API Counts

Is GetSocialLeaderboard counted as one API call regardless of the number of friends returned?

Are there additional billing or performance considerations based on response size or number of leaderboard entries returned? 9. Recommended Usage

Are brainCloud Friends suitable as an app-specific “mutual follow friend cache”?

We will not use brainCloud Friends for unrelated gameplay relationships. We plan to keep FOLLOW as our source of truth and use brainCloud Friends only as a derived mirror/cache for mutual follow relationships. Does this align with recommended brainCloud usage?

Thank you.

Added the additional details to 13660

Q1: The removed player is completely excluded from reward calculation, so if the deletion happens before the job runs, that player is never iterated over and receives no rank or rewards.
Q2: Yes, the modified score will be used. The job always reads live state. Note that whether the score actually gets modified depends on the leaderboard type (e.g., for the LOW_VALUE type, only updates if the new score is less than the existing)
Q3: No backfilling, the next joiner goes to the latest instance, not the freed spot in ^2. No loop over earlier instances (^1, ^2) ever happens. The next joiner goes to ^3 (or ^4 if ^3 is full). The freed spot in ^2 stays empty permanently.

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