Voters overwhelmingly favor hiding who is online. I agree with the sentiment, but this has some technical problems in implementing it perfectly. It’s easy to remove the list from the main real-time ladder page, and also remove the online status from the individual player’s ladder page. However, someone could still look at the list of recently finished games, and then compare that to their list of games that person is in to see who recently became available on the ladder. If the total count of players was shown, this could be combined with the previous list to give a pretty accurate picture of who is online.
Perhaps this could be countered by hiding real-time games until a few hours after they’re done. This just feels like a bad solution though. Even if that was done, there will always be some ways of figuring out who might be playing that can’t be stopped, such as people that play at predictable schedules or if someone always joins the RT ladder when they’re online.
When I originally developed the real-time ladder, I was hoping it would draw bigger numbers. If there were more people online all the time, I feel that hiding the list would be less important since, if there’s a large list of people online, you have less control over what opponent you’ll get. Certainly there’s a lot that can be done to increase the draw of the real-time ladder – the items in this poll is a start, and the process for joining a game can be streamlined to avoid making players refresh their list manually while waiting for a game to get created.
This one will stay on the backburner for now since I’m not sure how to best implement it. I’d like to open it up for discussion though – please post your ideas or thoughts!
being able to see the latest games doesn't really worry me as much as seeing the exact list of who is currently joined. most people who are playing the realtime ladder only play 1 or 2 games on each session, so there will always be some unsureness if the people count in the ladder are the same who recently finished the games or someone else altogether.
about the number of people playing: i don't think the RT ladder has proper visibility on the warlight site, it should be a clear join/unjoin button on the open games page, that's where most users are going looking for a new game. right now it's hidden 3 clicks deep into the website. i realize this requires some changes on the layout, but it would bring in a lot more players imho.
