The player list experiment

[Lord Caedus]

I mentioned it during the initial discussion on the discord, but if this was done, which I don't think is necessarily a great idea, the best way to do it would be to show what region someone is in, unless you're in that region as well, then it can show specific system information. A small example would be Player A in New York seeing Player B logged in in "Bretonia" but if Player A moves to Manchester they can now see that Player B is in Cambridge. I think this would be the best way to implement it to reduce the issue of it being hard to actually find people, while still keeping the intent of obfuscating their presence for everyone logged in to see, I'm just unsure how practical that would be to implement.

On a side note, I think a good change in relation to this would be disabling the ability for bots to track the online player list and pinging discords when players with certain ID/IFFs fly in to a system. If anything is actively working to harm activity it's that. People aren't going to log in to look for an encounter when they can simply wait for a discord bot to find the encounter for them.

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[Enko]

Oh and Enkk, cloaks should already display only region on forums too now iirc.

It does not unless it was patched in within the last couple weeks anyway.

As for the suggestion at large though, honestly I just think that in general its something that would be nice to have but there would need to be ingame methodolgy to fix this. Having comms beacons that could be disrupted/repaired to give the ability to see in certain areas would be an example of having gameplay to accomodate such things.

Otherwise, the issue is that people may just spend too much time blindly jumping around. I transported 100k units of gold in the gold event and I got pirated/stopped a total of 0 times on a predictable route, not having to stop once. Not sure how this would work if people did not even know I was coming.

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[Fab]

I'm really starting to think that the current map (sirius sector as a whole) is way too large and it really dilutes player interaction. thinking emoji

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ARES / Faction Information / Feedback

[LuckyOne]

Otherwise, the issue is that people may just spend too much time blindly jumping around. I transported 100k units of gold in the gold event and I got pirated/stopped a total of 0 times on a predictable route, not having to stop once. Not sure how this would work if people did not even know I was coming.

There was barely any pirating in the recent event because the lawful side just roflstomped every attempt of doing it by running 5-10 player convoys all the time. No sane lone pirate would take those odds. And there are few groups focused exclusively on piracy. And the piracy has a big stigma because of butth??? silent traders that used to whine a lot in the past, so it's now frowned upon and generally not enjoyable.

On topic, this idea pops up from time to time, but it would just hurt the probability of interactions without tools that would replace the ability to find when and where people are flying somewhere. The recent changes with the cruise speeds and the cloaking devices are spot on, now there's a decent incentive to use them, and piracy in the same system is actually possible.

If anything this idea could work in a limited fashion as Haste said. Maybe make it only show region when someone is hiding in a nebula/asteroid field?
But that would only lead to less usage of the cloaking devices > less people gaming to collect materials / credits to build them.

The mod has made incredible gameplay and technological strides in the past couple of patches, but maybe it's simply too late. The community has been poisoned by the years of toxic interactions so that they just prefer to play in their own little corner of Sirius and not interact with anyone who is known to be an asshat.

[Enko]

There was barely any pirating in the recent event because the lawful side just roflstomped every attempt of doing it by running 5-10 player convoys all the time. No sane lone pirate would take those odds. And there are few groups focused exclusively on piracy. And the piracy has a big stigma because of butth??? silent traders that used to whine a lot in the past, so it's now frowned upon and generally not enjoyable.

Well that didn't happen, the top GF member that traded literally hundreds of thousands did not go in a convoy for the majority of it. Even then the convoys we did do with GF were literally 50% Shetlands that would crumple like paper to a few pirates that come in.

I also spent most of my time solo doing about 60-70k gold and met nobody at all times of day. There were pirates, and we did take losses and did have responses yet it was still far and few between. There has been plenty of time where there were just a few people on and people were vulnerable.

I just don't think people really are interested in it anymore, if I wasn't doing things on the lawful side I would be pirating every day personally.

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[Amba]

As someone who did a little bit of piracy during the event the server population is just too low for it to be even remotely entertaining. At least playing LH you can proactively seek out targets, but just sitting on a lane for who knows how long waiting to see red was miserable

[Lord Caedus]

There was barely any pirating in the recent event because the lawful side just roflstomped every attempt of doing it by running 5-10 player convoys all the time. No sane lone pirate would take those odds. And there are few groups focused exclusively on piracy. And the piracy has a big stigma because of butth??? silent traders that used to whine a lot in the past, so it's now frowned upon and generally not enjoyable.

Well that didn't happen, the top GF member that traded literally hundreds of thousands did not go in a convoy for the majority of it. Even then the convoys we did do with GF were literally 50% Shetlands that would crumple like paper to a few pirates that come in.

I also spent most of my time solo doing about 60-70k gold and met nobody at all times of day. There were pirates, and we did take losses and did have responses yet it was still far and few between. There has been plenty of time where there were just a few people on and people were vulnerable.

I just don't think people really are interested in it anymore, if I wasn't doing things on the lawful side I would be pirating every day personally.

Actively trying to pirate targets is about the least entertaining activity that this game has to offer, and that's saying something considering how dull other aspects of this game can be. But this isn't really the point of the thread so I'm not even sure why it's being discussed here.

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[Denelo]

oh no not this again.

I don't particularly care about the forum list, but we rejected player list changes when we were consistently player capped because it'd limit activity. The arguments haven't changed in the past decade and a half: Interaction creates activity, and people need to know where others are to interact. That was back when you could sit by a lane and just expect people to fly past. Now you're lucky if you run into someone else at all if you're not on a major trade route. And it's not exactly hard to hide as-is: Not only are cloaking devices a thing now, but all the old tricks still apply. Not only that, but jump drives mean gates and holes aren't the impenetrable bottlenecks they once were, which even further reduces incidental interaction. The only way I could see this being successful is if we completely culled system count - and I mean on the scale of "only Liberty still exists," which isn't really tenable.

[Enko]

I believe updating the cloak to work for the playerlist on the website works. I would even be open to the idea of a beacon scrambler item you could put on a ship that does so but it would be at a similar cost/drawback side to a cloak.

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[Groshyr]

Players filtered by region sounds really nice, with players cloaked being completely invisibile in the players list but I'm doubt the latter part is possible -- at least not without putting Aingar in front of the PC for another few nights.