I don’t remember seeing this mentioned before, but it’s becoming more of an issue of late… There are occasionally some areas (such as the Station Park) that might have a large population, yet only 1 or 2 individuals that are not ‘away’. This artificially inflates the population of the containing area, especially when you add up all the away population for an entire town that may leave only one or two active/idle individuals out of a dozen counted (which could be within a private residence, no less!). It would therefore be helpful to have the population counts in the Locations section of Area Info to either split out or at least indicate how many listed are actually Away so one can know if it might be worth the time to go exploring through an area to get to a specific location with someone present as you would know in advance if you’re going to find only away individuals, or possible RP opportunities.
That’s actually a great idea. Some of those areas are effectively ghost towns and it’d be helpful to see where the active people actually are.
I had this same thought some time ago. Would be nice.
And to take it even further, it would be nice to be able to just publish one’s location in the global awake list. Not automatically but opt in… I know some people enjoy the whole “come find me” aspect of the world, but currently you have go all across the map to figure out where everyone is and at worst that leads to a lot of join-leave spam in rooms with active roleplay when people pop in and decide they don’t like who’s there, and that can be really distracting. Especially when you then have to decide are you going to bother reacting to the person who came in to invite them into the scene, or are they just going to be another passerby.
I know you can use the status field and that people do use the status field for that, but it’s a bandage at best and it’s difficult to fit anything other than Sinder locations on there in a meaningful way. And then you don’t have any room for your actual status.
I’ve also had this idea in the past, thanks for fleshing it out and putting together a proposal.
I’ve seen something similar on other sites where they have the population count in bold, but the active population in parentheses so about like (7)12. Having something like that would definitely help with being aware of idled players. Though, I thought if they were idle for so long it auto-sleeps the character? Which sleeping eliminates the person from the population count.
unfortunately parentheses are already used up for the hidden population. 4 (+4) means there are four people and four more in private areas/rooms.
Still, I think this needs to be addressed somehow because clearly it’s a mediocre experience to hike all the way to the park to see it’s two dozen away people.
I think it would even make sense to completely hide the population within hidden rooms and instances. There’s no way for the general public to interact with them after all. You’d have to know who they are in the first place to contact them and that’s exactly what the hidden status prevents.
You know, I actually agree! But I think it’s a bit of a marketing issue. When you show awake and awake-but-hidden counters the population seems higher so, for new people, wolfery seems more active. For people who’d been here for a while, the reverse is more true, though, they know the numbers are somewhat inflated when you’re looking for specifically people to interact with.
The marketing angle can also be a downside, like my first experience when I joined the site before xmas the count showed like 100 people online but only 20 or so were actually doing anything and half of those were at the park. It did feel a bit like there was a lie told afterwards.
Luckily for me the xmas holidays came right after and the number of people went up pretty high which had me stick around.
It is a sound idea, I think. The whole purpose for Area population is to help players find out where things are happening. Splitting out Private population has a similar purpose.
From a technical implementation perspective, it is also doable.
I guess we could have 3 numbers:
- Awake - public
- Awake - public but away
- Awake - private
Since private cannot be found in a simple way anyway, I don’t think we gain anything by splitting them into Active/Away.
Any suggestion on how to display those numbers in the GUI in a satisfying/easy to understand way?
All three numbers? Click to toggle mode? Colors?
Or color the number based on threshold values?
- White - less than 33% away characters
- Yellow - between 33% - 66% away characters
- Red - more than 66% away characters
It would give a decent hint with a color language we already use.
If you don’t have a client open, like an active tab in a browser, the character will eventually be auto-slept. But except for that, we don’t auto-sleep characters for simply idling.
Glad you stuck around! 
I tried to avoid “false advertising” by including activity-status color in the Awake list, so you can get a good sense of activity.
But maybe sorting/filtering the Awake list based on activity status may further improve that?
That’s overly cryptic; I think.
I’m not sure there is indeed any usefulness in showing the private numbers. Using the same colours as the names do seems most useful in practice.
This way the private changes to “away” but it’s also changing in colour so there’s a clear indication of what happened.
The contrast is shite; though.
It would be great to have a few more filter and sorting options. Show/Hide for Away and ordering by Awake time or Active/Idle/Away. Filter lists for the built-in tags would also be a nice stretch-goal, to eg. hide people with a dislike for something you’re looking for.
That’s already a thing, check help filter.
Oh, yeah the search can do that. I was thinking more of like an allow/denylist that’s always active. Perhaps that’s a niche feature. Didn’t know that there’s a whole help topic for that search though, thanks for that! Might be good to have a note about that somewhere near the search box in the UI.
I think Shinyuu is right on this point. Showing the ‘private’ total is counter-productive, except to the area owner. If you aren’t already aware of who is in the private location so you can go there directly, then there’s no point because you won’t know which private area it is and searching them all kind of violates the whole premise of a private area.
Changing the private indicator to separate out the ‘away’ individuals and color it the same would probably be the best choice.
That’s weird because sometimes my character auto-sleeps even when I’m active and typing to other people. It’s happened to me multiple times while I was in the park even.