The proposal is to modify the player list API to instead displaying "Player Name Per System Per Region", display "Player Count Per System Per Region" or even Players by Region. Here's a mock on how it would look like:



Why?

to incentivize players to be proactive. instead of reacting to the existing player list, they would need to log their characters to see the actual player list.

Problems

we'll miss the informative player list and this might create inconveniences.
players might just log, scan the playerlist, then leave if they don't like what they see.

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I propose this experiment to run for at least a week, and collect player's feedback and experiences at the end of the week.

I'd prefer removing it altogether but that's fine too I guess

Why not take it one step further and apply the same for the ingame player list? No more shadowlogging, and bounty hunters would actually need to put effort into tracking people instead of staring at the playerlist. People would go for activity clusters instead of selectively going to look for specific people, and anyone who is in touch with their friends knows when they are logged in anyway.

Truly natural encounters. And powertraders can't complaing about getting targeted by specific individuals either.

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Why not take this a step further? Change in-game player list to reflect regions only, like cloaked ships except apply this to everybody. Using player list is technically metagaming, and if someone dislikes you, they can watch your transport and F1 at the right time. Player lists could be abused by anybody playing any faction really.

The forum player list could be removed altogether or set a delay of like five minutes if you really want to see activity. I mean, if NYSE can show 15 minute delayed stocks, why can't we? xD

I like the idea.

to me it sounds like it will make things even harder.

and make the community rely more on raidlog-like pings.

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I agree with Somba and Devils‘s

Do it and give it a try!

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Has anyone actually spoken to any of the Lead Developers or Admins on this issue or is this another poll made to excavate replies for no reason whatsoever and be forgotten again in a few weeks

And I really mean it seriously

This is far from a new idea, though the idea has come in different shapes and with varying degrees of "obfuscation".

If we ever did this, it would definitely apply to both the in-game and forum player lists. Doing just the forum is going to result in nothing more than people logging in, sitting on a base and scrolling through the player list. If anything the tedium of doing this would put people off and I'd just expect player counts to go down across the board.

The advantages here are quite obvious. Without a player list to rely on the quality of encounters would probably go up, and players would be naturally encouraged to log in and figure out where the population spikes are exactly and what those players are doing. Piracy becomes far more threatening without the ability to just look a system or two ahead. Probably good.

The disadvantages are also extremely blatant. A lot of players - myself included, most of the time - are "reactionary"*. They see players - or groups of players - they find interesting for whatever reason (whether that is "Hey I like roleplaying with that guy" or "Hey that guy has a huge bounty I want to collect" or "Hey that guy is fun to fight", or anything else) on the player list, in a specific system, and fly a ship towards them. That goes away almost entirely. I can see it being quite off-putting to see 4 players in a system only to learn that they are all "boring, silent powertraders", for example. Travel times, even after cruise buffs, can be quite long and not getting anything out of your time investment sucks.

This poll is, quite frankly, useless, because the only question we want answered is "Would this change reduce our average player count". If the answer to that question is yes, then I think we currently do not have the luxury of considering it. If the answer is no, then it's definitely worth considering.

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A random idea I had before pressing post is that perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere where the player list works the way it currently does in some systems - like House space - but is obfuscated outside of that. It'd add a bit of inherent danger to the supposedly dangerous border- and edgeworlds, but House space would remain the same. It's even somewhat explainable in terms of roleplay, with ships likely being detected in House space much more easily by various satellites and whatever else. This would be a potential way to trial this while not risking the potential instant annihilation of our remaining playerbase.

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*) I know that some people will be inclined to say "Aha, so taking this option away from you will force you to log in and fly around looking for players instead!". Yes, it in theory would. In practice it would make players like myself just start our Sekiro NG+ because that would get me far more fun per hour than aimlessly floating around systems I have already seen six hundred times.

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I personally really think that all this will end up is that people end up getting one natural encounter per week without organising something beforehand on discord.

I think a far better version of this would be showing the ingame player list by region as it is when cloaked and keeping the forum player list as is, but having it update once every five minutes or ten minutes. That way you can have reactive logging and the activity it brings, without having the ability to tell exactly where people are on a minute-by-minute basis.