The player list experiment

[Locksmith]

Sometimes it's hard enough to find someone as it is right now.

[Straws]

Ill add some context/data to the piracy discussion. I was Molly-affiliated for the whole event, shipping 34k gold. I was in a small-medium PvP fight in Dublin that resulted in at least one dead lawful Hegemon full of gold. I saw 1 lawful trader intercepted and killed at the NL JH. I was killed in my Hegemon once after refusing to drop my haul (lawful backup was closer than anticipated). I was pirated by a lawful once. I'm not sure what you guys were doing to avoid all this action, but peaceful power-trading was not my experience at all, and I play mostly off-peak due to my timezone.

Back on topic, I think the player-activity concerns are valid; space is large and empty. Showing region might work, but players may waste a lot of time searching the whole damn region. Anonymously showing exact system activity would fix this, but I find that some faction-pairs don't have much material to RP with. Exact system IFFs would prevent travel-time leading to low quality encounters, but it may also disadvantage many IFFs: running a LH or Pirate IFF gives you appropriate equipment, but is a massive blackflag that traders can just avoid. The current system requires those apparent 'pirate spreadsheets', a player to be running a faction tag, or some guess work based on character name/location. The IFF system stops all this work. One work-around may be to have unlawful IFFs show up as Freelancer in the player list. However, then lawfuls will complain about their own IFFs causing smugglers to avoid them. Corporates then do the same, claiming their IFF makes them a target. Thus, most of the server shows as a Freelancer, rendering the IFF system pointless and inaccurate.

So, perhaps showing name and region is better. Gives you some sense of who is where, without it leading to bad encounters when you actually find them. I'm not sure this is worth the wasted travel time, though. I actually really like @Haste's House space idea. It makes sense lore-wise, and adds some varied 'terrain' to Sirius, which frankly has very little. All you can really tell about a region is its colour palette and what factions you'll find. The Sigmas are blue, cloudy, and have a big GMG presence - big deal. If you can also say that Borders and Independents have no satellites, but do have patchy trade-networks, they will actually feel different, rather than just having different aesthetics. Further out stuff like the Omicrons don't even have trade-networks, making them even more unknown. The concern about not-finding-anyone rears its head again, but honestly the far-out places are functionally smaller, so its easier to find people (with exceptions, of course). Omicron Minor is large, but the areas anyone is interested in a pretty tightly centred. Sigma-17 is medium-small, but made even smaller by the ternary star system taking up the entire centre. House space seems to have a greater tendency to fill its NavMap, other places seem a lot more concentrated. I recently was telling a friend about regional differences, but honestly it mostly comes down to whether you press your cruise hotkey or your dock hotkey. Adding more variety here sounds good, and actually makes those distant stars more dangerous and unpredictable, like they should be. If you want to find players faster, just go to House space.

Despite all those words, why speculate? The title calls it an experiment, so why not just experiment? I don't see the harm in running one of these options for a week or two. Upon joining the server, have an in-game message describe the temporary change, and invite players to post their feedback on the forums. Player count can be monitored independently. See how it goes, and decide from there.

[Kosa]

Nay. It would make finding proper interactions harder. That's bad for gameplay.

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