Sorry for the confusion, I was under the impression a publisher key gave you certain read-only permissions on a user given they own your game (this was silly in hindsight)

While the users in question had public profiles, their privacy settings for friends lists were set to private.

Thank you for your help! I now understand what you meant by "as long as users grant your app permission".

You can set up a lobby type with no server by leaving the server dropdown unselected in the lobby type configuration.

e678a202-7170-409e-a1b6-16d612b51c4a-image.png
In this setup, the lobby will disband after sending the STARTING event once it's full. At that point, you can use
the OnLobbyEvent callback and connect your players to Photon Cloud when the DISBANDED event is received.

Lobbies in brainCloud are flexible, they can be used to gather players before transitioning into hosted servers or async offline matches, and more.

Ah - perfect. Yeah - that sounds like a better option given the full requirements.

Glad you found it... and welcome to brainCloud!

My profile displays in a different format than my logs do yes - reading 16:05:53.051 PST vs 4:05:53 PM PST, it's not a huge thing but would be nice as preference in profile settings (or cycling format on the log view timestamp itself)

Cool. Thanks for sharing the solution here @devsleeper !