Is the Universe Redux going to address the problem of knowing who is online? I won't go into all of the specifics but I for one would like to play VO without people knowing I'm online without actually seeing me within the game world. Have you come up with with alternative systems for "active players" and the chat system in general?

What's wrong with the chat system?

That is what buddy system is for.

The "Active Players" page will eventually go away.

Yes, this is on my list.

@ray+inc Thanks for the reply.
@skelbley08 Mostly the "realistic" aspect of it and there are other issues that aren't very "real" right now because of the lack of players. Other problems I think have been noted, but they're all in some other threads. Didn't really want to start a big huge discussion here :)

Thank the Void.

Could we still have a counter somewhere showing total number of players online? It wouldn't compromise anonymity, but you'd still get to have an idea how many people are on.

And anyone who looks at a counter and says "Oh, too many people online, I might get killed" and doesn't log on because of that is already probably the kind of person who would log out if they get scared. I just think it'd be interesting to see how many players are on.

There'll be a graph showing relative player activity over time. But probably without specific numbers, even. So it'll be possible to see when there are a lot of people on, or a few (and broken down by faction).

Sounds good :-)

Yes agree, sounds good. The sooner the Active Players page goes away the better.

So it'll be possible to see when there are a lot of people on, or a few (and broken down by faction).

This will defeat the purpose when grey becomes a faction. In fact, it'll be worse.

Overall, you should not include faction information. The last thing we need is compounding of the "nobody plays, so I won't play" issue. Serco looking to log on, seeing 15 Itani and 3 Serco, is not a good thing.

What is wrong with knowing who is online?

I like my radio silence and would not like people with "/msg irc active" bound to mouse button 3 to ruin that every five minutes.

I like my radio silence and would not like people with "/msg irc active" bound to mouse button 3 to ruin that every five minutes.

This.

That didn't really answer my question.. but whatever.. I don't care much either way.

My main reason for wanting this aspect of the site gone is simply because I know I do not log on when I can see a low number of people online. I would be more inclined to log on to check out the action if this information was not available. I would then probably stick around for a bit.

If there's others like this, then this should result in a larger amount of people logging on, as opposed to sitting on the sidelines and not playing because nobody else is playing.

Does that answer your question?

So I am currently not seeing a list when I navigate to the active players page. Might just be an IE issue as I'm on a new install of Windows and can't check in another browser...

...or is this intentional? Baby steps towards a better solution perhaps?

Edit: nm, installing Bootcamp while viewing IE apparently was the culprit.

Well, I guess we can hope.