online/active player count on character screen?

[nateflory]

Well, I tried wading through the myriad topics that came up when searching suggestinos for "Online" and "active" and "not sleeping", and hopefully this is not a duplicate. Sorry if it's been asked before....


Would it be worth it to have a simple line on the main "character screen" where it lists all your characters, which mentioned the number of currently Active/Online players? Not any real statistics, just a count of how many people were doing something in the last....say...5 minutes?

This would mainly be a quick reference of if others could potentially be active around the same time you are. Not necessarily in the location of your characters, not necessarily in the same Language as your characters, but something nice to make a snap decision along the lines of:
"well, there are 3 people active in Cantr right now including myself, so I won't bother staying online and refreshing the screen for the next hour".

Or on the flip side:
"There are 629 active players, so I'll stick around a bit and see if anything happens where my character are in the next few minutes, or speak up a bit to my friend who is usually active around this time."

...

I can already see some of the bad opinionms, as from our character's perspectives they could not "guess the future" about the potential of activity, nor would this number be a really accurate method of measuring 'activity'. Heck, if everyone is just sitting and refreshing the screen, they'd not show up as Active anyway using this suggestion, so would be a moot point.
But to keep things somewhat IC, if we-the-player can see a lot of activity at the current time, chances are our characters would have a general feeling of activity in town, even without events being posted, etc. And if no one is talking, there is still the potential of some local characters to be "upright and mobile" and could be worthy of interaction via a short emote or conversation-starter.

Part of that thought springs from one town with constant:
1600-5.35 You see [annoying] say "Is anyone awake?"
1600-5.12 You see [annoying] say "Anyone out there want to help me?"
1600-4.05 You see [annoying] say "Is anyone awake?"
1600-2.27 You see [annoying] say "Is anyone awake?"

[fishfin]

It sounds like an OK idea to me, kind of like the thing on the runescape home page that says how many people are currently playing...

[Torkess_theCommie]

I guess some people could find a use for it, when I used to play runescape, those numbers were pretty meaningless for me, but it probably be different in cantr, since there are way less people playing than in runscape. It also be probably useful for staff, like when do most people log in.. etc, unless staff already keeps track of that, I think it's most likely. Anyways, like the idea.

[SekoETC]

At first I was like "this has been suggested", but then I actually read through the thing and it's for players in general, not just checking if the player of a certain character is online. Since that could easily be abused.

[Solfius]

I think it's good from a marketing point of view, so that visitors can easily see the game is active.

[Jos Elkink]

I like it, actually. The database overhead might be a bit large for such a minor feature, but maybe not. Some other programmers are better at deciding that ...

[marol]

It's easy. But with one exception - some players don't log out. It is possible however to show number of players active in last 5 minutes (or any other period).

Another issue - we have players on booth sides of Atlantic Ocean. So if you see 200 players active, that still doesn't mean your language zone is active now.

[Crosshair]

Well you could just have a counter for your zone, or in options you could choose which counters were visible, like a ticklist?

[Solfius]

It's easy. But with one exception - some players don't log out. It is possible however to show number of players active in last 5 minutes (or any other period).

Another issue - we have players on booth sides of Atlantic Ocean. So if you see 200 players active, that still doesn't mean your language zone is active now.

I don't think that's important, I think its main value is in making the game look active to potential new players

[tiddy ogg]

Another game I play, Project Rock Star, does this. It also gives a figure for the total number of "managers", which must be the total number of accounts. (In this case that number is so large compared with those on-line that it must be a total of every account ever opened, no matter that most have been cancelled.)

[formerly known as hf]

Yay.

I like this - it goes with my suggestion about news/active forum threads on the homepage...

We do need to spruce up that homepage with things that indicate the overall activity of the game - it's pretty dull at the moment for people considering it...

[Crosshair]

Aye, stale and doesn't move much... a news thingy would be good on the home page.

[fishfin]

what about if there was a thing for all languages and then on the english page there is a thing for english players, spanish page spanish players... as well as the thing for all players

[nateflory]

*cheers* A decent suggestion it seems!

And to keep the flavour of Cantr, might I suggest the text to be:
(<CantrTime> - You see ### active players within the last ### minutes.)

Actually, to reply to some comments, my initial ideas was jsut a very general count. Not even broken down by language or anything. However, that's for the ProgD to decide on the specifics. If the count is simple to filter by location or something, feel free. I'd be happy with a "Global variable":wink:

I was mostly curious to see if anyone, anywhere was active, to make a snap-decision about posting some innane comment with one of my characters over my lunch break at work, or simply wait until the end of the day when I can login for a more extended period of time.

(reasoning is I'm so addicted to this game, I have found myself hitting refresh every few minutes, even when I know from experience that no one ever will reply to one of my more talkative characters at that time of day. You know, when I could have been doing something like..oh...Work-related work to pay the bills. )

[Spillages]

I think it's good from a marketing point of view, so that visitors can easily see the game is active.

I like the idea, only problem I see is the potential of scaring away visitors by thinking this site doesn't have alot of players and would be a bad place to advertise.

I suggest we take ech player online and the list as characters active. so if there are 4 players that have been active in the past 5 minutes and they each had 10 characters then it would show up as 40 characters online, but if they have only had one or two characters active then it will still show all 10 of theirs. Possibly organize it into a table listing each language of characters so that advertisers would feel more invited to advertise in a certain language and then put a total at the bottom to show all languages combined.