Ever since the implementation of Glass Doors I’ve been able to get a better idea of my surroundings, avoiding unnecessary travel spam into rooms by already knowing who’s in there or not.
Statuses like idle and away are already visible by clicking the icon, which makes it easy to not waste my time going into a room with only idle people:
I think it would very much make sense to be able to see the opposite - if somebody near me was looking to roleplay it might just convince me to head into that room.
You know what would be even more useful? Showing About Character on click. You can get this anyway by typing the name into the character list and clicking, but this way would be significantly faster.
YOu know, this plays (sort of) into something I’ve been thinking about as well.
Bots show up in the player count of an area - So someplace like Riverside (The Chateau more specifically) always shows 4 people in the area… But they’re bots. This can lead to unneccessary time and travel running through an area looking for the elusive players that you’ll never find.
An idea to fix this, is, possibly, a list of players in an area - Ignore private areas obviously. Say, you click on an area info, click a room/area with players in it, and a little pop up (similar to an about popup) flys up, with a simple list of users in the area. It’d help people decide if they want to go to an area or not (Who’s over there, and do I want to play with or avoid them?) as well as figuring out if it’s people vs. bots.
That’s honestly on me. We lost the credentiasls for the account that runs those bots so we can’t convert them into proper bots that wouldn’t show up in the counter.
I’m not saying I’d be against the detailed summary but we’d have to be very careful with it in a sense that if we reveal other players’ locations, that should be either very generic in regards to who’s there or broad, and I’m not even sure that all the top level areas as they are now are broad enough.
You can’t go /too/ broad though, or it defeats the purpose. the idea being similar to glass doors - To see who is in an area so you can make a decision on if you want to go there or not. An argument could be made that you should have to go to the area - So, for example, stand in the teleport room for the Shrine - but then be able to click through the public rooms in the area list to see who’s where. It’s glass doors without requiring you to move through (potentially) full rooms, and it’s a purely OOC mechanic to save time and help people find RP with the people they want to RP with.