Talk:General Discussion/@comment-24903916-20140917174726/@comment-139.193.100.161-20140919024636

The "friendly fleets" button was originally a function devs wanted to tie to a never-implemented "invite friends" function that combined would have let us form the Kancolle equivalent of a MMORPG clan although what for and how it was going to work had never been detailed. In any case, the point of both functions was to turn Kancolle into a real social game and - more importantly - expand the player base by encouraging players to invite their friends to play the game. The latter intent essentially disappeared when the Kancolle player base exploded beyond the servers' ability to serve them. Given that there's now a lottery to slow down player population growth, the "invite friends" function is not only unnecessary, it would have caused problems. At the same time the functions associated with "friendly fleets", likely requiring greater cross-player interactions and the implementation of real social functions in the game, would have created a real nightmare to the sysadmins IRL if actually implemented given the limitations in their infrastructure. In any other game, the company would have said, "Screw that, let's borrow money and quintuple capacity to absorb new players and implement new features!" But Kancolle the game is UNPROFITABLE (the franchise is, just not the game itself), so both DMM and Kadokawa must be extra careful when they expand Kancolle's server infrastructure. For these reasons, the "friendly fleets" button will remain greyed out until someone in Kadokawa or DMM figures out a way to turn the game itself profitable (and justify the new functions as income generators). At the moment, that's not likely to happen.