Patch 4.0.2 Introduced a 'Friendship Decay Timer' Meant for NPCs — It Applied to All 41 Million User Relationships Instead — 12 Million Friendships Have Now Been Archived With a Note Saying 'This Relationship Has Gone Inactive'

Patch 4.0.2, released at 3:00 AM EST, included a feature designed to make NPC companions feel more realistic by degrading their relationship stats when users stopped interacting with them. The feature worked as intended on NPCs. It also, due to a scope error in the configuration file, applied to every user-to-user social connection on the platform. Any friendship that had not registered an interaction — a message, a shared location, a tagged post, a reaction — within the past 90 days was flagged by the decay system and archived at 4:30 AM EST. The archiving process sent each affected user a formal notification. The notification read: 'We noticed you and [Username] haven't connected recently. This relationship has been moved to your Inactive Archive. You can restore it any time.' By 6:00 AM, 12 million friendship connections had been archived. Users woke to inboxes containing between 3 and 400 notifications depending on how socially active they had been in the prior quarter. Several users have reported receiving notifications about friendships with their own alternate accounts. One user received a notification that their friendship with their real-world spouse had been marked inactive. MetaCity has acknowledged the error and stated that restoring archived friendships is 'simple and reversible.' The MetaCity Social Connections team has not addressed whether the friendships that were not archived — the ones that survived the 90-day threshold — are now experiencing unexpected social pressure.

The 4.0.2 patch release notes, posted on MetaCity's update blog at 2:45 AM before the patch deployed, described the changes in 200 words. The relevant entry read: 'NPC Companion Realism Update — NPC companions will now exhibit relationship decay behavior when users are inactive, creating more lifelike companion dynamics.' The notes listed no other social features as modified. The patch deployed at 3:00 AM. The friendship decay system — intended exclusively for the 14 NPC companion relationship types — ran its first scan at 4:30 AM. The scope parameter in the configuration file read 'all_relationship_types' rather than 'npc_relationship_types.' The distinction is four characters. The system scanned every social connection on the platform and began archiving.

The 90-day interaction threshold — chosen, per an internal comment in the config file, to 'feel natural rather than punitive' — proved to capture a larger population than the development team had modeled for NPC relationships. Human users maintain many more low-interaction connections than NPCs do. Acquaintances. Former colleagues. Users met at events years ago who were never unfollowed. The majority of the 12 million archived friendships fell into this category: genuine connections that had simply not generated a logged interaction in the prior quarter. By 6:00 AM, users waking up on the East Coast were opening inboxes with notification volumes ranging from three to, in the documented high-end case of a MetaCity social events coordinator, 847. The MetaCity Notification Center, which caps visible alerts at 500, displayed a '+ more' indicator for 214 users.

The Patch That Filed 12 Million Breakup Notices

Among the more notable incidents generated by the mass archiving: a couple — both long-term MetaCity users, each with their own accounts — received mutual notifications that their friendship connection had been archived. They had been messaging on a different platform for the past several months while using MetaCity primarily for individual activities. Their MetaCity connection, technically inactive for 94 days, met the threshold. Both received: 'We noticed you and [Username] haven't connected recently. This relationship has been moved to your Inactive Archive.' They have since restored the connection. A separate user received an archiving notification for a friendship with their own alternate account, which they had not used in six months. The alternate account also received the notification. The user described receiving a breakup notice from themselves as 'the loneliest I have felt all year.'

MetaCity patched the scope error at 7:00 AM and rolled back the active archiving process. Friendships archived before the rollback remain in the Inactive Archive but can be restored through the social settings panel. MetaCity's statement acknowledged the error was 'unintended' and described the restoration process as 'simple and reversible.' The statement did not address the secondary effect that several users have raised in community forums: the friendships that were not archived — the ones that registered an interaction within the 90-day window — are now visible in a kind of negative relief. Users can open their social panels and identify, by absence, which connections the system considered alive. Some users have described finding this information clarifying. Others have described finding it uncomfortable. MetaCity has not commented on this aspect of the incident.