Wholist for Active but Offline characters

[Smithers]

At the OOC chat today, I broached a subject of finding some better way to be aware of characters who are active and available, but might not necessarily be online all the time.

Example, I'm around a lot, I advertise my character's services and I respond promptly to IC mail and OOC notes but I sometimes hear that nobody's around to provide said services. (Cellophane, Mister Cellophane shoulda been my name...)

I was hoping we could figure out some way to show that these people still exist IC, without the helpful OOC reminder of seeing them logged in on the who list. Maybe with a "who active" option or set of options that will list offline people too.

[Kinaed]

I spoke to staff about this - particularly focused on possible alterations to the wholist - even drafted up a few options, and some issues came out of the woodwork:

1) Whereas we have a problem that players currently see the wholist and ignore active, offline players, there are many more active characters than our current wholist is designed to display - right now, we have 97 active characters. We have maybe 20ish of those characters on at any one time.

2) Adding a "who active" isn't something we think people will check at all if they're not currently using commands that find active characters like 'guildlist' or 'guildlist active' for example; it's wasted coding time. People are used to seeing people online when they look at who.

3) On that, several players who are used to using who to see who they can play with immediately will probably psychologically resist a change to 'here's everyone I can RP with right now, and here's everyone else who is around, but not really around to be on hand right now'. It's changing the fundamental use of who.

4) Messing with the wholist in this way would be a major code rewrite. We need to be sure it's valuable before we go down the rabbit hole. We already had a bit of trouble decoupling who from login connections to resolve people seeing mages dropping in and out when they switched to astral - and whereas that issue is resolved with a major rewrite, the new code isn't designed to track the data of active, offline characters this way.

5) The above said, there is some value to it. For example, the purpose of who is to know who is around and in what capacity. I think there's value to saying 'here is who is online right now to RP with' but also 'here is who else is around frequently enough to reach out to' in a large, consistent way.

If we do that, though, we definitely need to think carefully about how we design this so that the wholist remains useable - when we got a list of around 40 people at once due to influxes, we had to create 'who check <name>' to let people find the status of people in the wholist because it was too big for purpose. Who cap didn't really help much.

What are player thoughts? Has anyone ever seen a really well done, huge who list?

[Taunya]

A suggestion: 'who' could remain as-is, and 'activity' could return a columned list of active characters. Without the titles, and perhaps 5 names per row, 100 names should fit on 20 lines.

[Kinaed]

I'm not sure that'd fix the issue, but it might improve the situation. I believe activity was removed because there was a problem with players faking their deaths and people presumably ICly or OOCly knowing about it due to seeing the dead character in the activity list (which wouldn't be resolved by this). I don't really see the harm in having the activity list in the who list, though, and I think it might be helpful - just not under the current output format. It'd probably have to be something like 'online players on the left in alphabetical order, taking up 2 -ish rows of 40, then the activity list on the right, taking up 3ish rows of 40'. It'd eliminate titles if we did that.

That said, as Az is already displaying the activity list to staff (we can see it when we type activity, we just suppressed it for players) it's probably easy enough to just display the list of names there. Then I think the issue becomes how many players hate this particular type of change. Passionately.

[Starstarfish]

Honestly, this is something you can get as someone who literally logs in daily and is on the wholist as it stands now. People's sense of "who is around" is entirely based on their timezone/regular play time and who they personally RP with often. And I am not sure any elaborate code change will address that.

Because is the issue addressing how people feel or how they talk about folks who are less active or about making sure those folks have a fair shot at business?

[LonelyNeptune]

I really liked having the top ten players in 'activity', so you can see who's around. Opportunities where that information can be metagamed are extremely rare and is solved with a slap on the wrist.

[Taunya]

Perhaps you could opt out of showing up on activity, like you can on guildlist.

[Myrella]

I think that the issue of being a player who can't be on as much as some because of timezones or IRL issues but still want to play an active roll should definitely be addressed, however I dunno if the wholist is the best place for the fix. The wholist is helpful in finding who is on right now. Who can I sent a tell or messenger to to get a scene started? Is that character I've got unfinished business with online right now? I can't think of a great solution to the issue though, however I think the ideal solution would be more of an IC one. More vnpcs in front of an active players shop, or more rumors about them, or something along those lines (both not really great ideas, but I hope you understand what I'm saying)

Also, tangentially, why not make activity visible to players, but instead of char names, use ooc titles. Activity should (in my mind) be more about the players than the characters. And even if someone has figured out which ooc title goes with which character, it's likely if that character went 'missing' that you still wouldn't know if they were using their old ooc title for a new character or if they're not really missing.

[Buzz K[ir]ill]

I'm not sure I even fully understand the complaint or how a "who's active" list would address it.

Is it that people are ICly saying they can't find someone to do X? Because that's primarily an IC perception problem with many potential IC solutions. Though, it may well be influenced by differing playtimes, time zones, etc. But my first guess would be that there's more you can be doing to advertise yourself IC.

If people are OOCly saying they can't find someone to do X, how is having a list of active players going to address that, if they don't know WHO is doing WHAT in-character? Again, your best bet is to advertise yourself IC. Rumors, notice board posts, putting stuff in your helpinfo, art advertisements, word of mouth, leaving business cards, getting your GL to help advertise your services, etc. All of these are ways to ICly inform the pbase that your character exists and will do X.

I don't mind that the activity list was removed (I do think it contributed to casual/unintended metagaming), but I don't really see what there is to gain by listing out who's active -- it's not going to provide a lot of actionable value and will offer very little context. As Kinaed mentioned, we already have IC guild lists that do provide some context and ARE ICly actionable.

[Smithers]

The issue as I perceive it is: TI can be difficult to play if you can't be logged in at the same time as others who may be interested in what your character can provide. (This can be related to timezone differences, or lacking free time, etc.) Is there anything we can code in to make it easier to enjoy the game, when you have less than ideal availability?

To put in my own words what others have already said, the game world is rarely larger than who's online at the time. And while there are many steps you can take to promote yourself IC, I don't think they overcome the obstacle of OOC perception on their own. I was just using a merchant as an example of a character who is reliable enough to complete tasks (filling commissions) but negatively affected by the player's inability to stay logged in.

The who list option was just a spur-of-the-moment idea during the OOC chat that got a bit of research, and probably shouldn't have been in the title for this thread. After reading the posts here, I agree that altering the usual who list for this purpose wouldn't fix the problem.

I wanted to clarify the intent of the thread with this post. I'll post again with more thoughts on possible solutions.