The player list experiment

[Haste]

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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