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’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.
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.
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.
That’s already a thing, check help filter.
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.