Program to help find others who play at the same hours? (Non-USA RPers, unite...)

wombat140

Little project of mine I'd like opinions on. I have an idea for a simple program that I think could be very handy for off-peak roleplayers - springing from my own exasperating experience of being a UK player surrounded by Americans who I speak to once and then never see at my time of day again. I'd like to find out whether it's worthwhile trying to make this happen and if so what features people would like to see in it, and I thought this was a good place to ask because so many of us here are from different countries.

My idea is to have a program that you could use to record what hours you actually do play a game: for instance, you could set it up to log when you were logged into, say, a particular game or chat channel (for IRC-based roleplaying channels), and it would generate a small graph of what times of day you were most often logged in, which you could then use in a forum signature or anywhere like that. Then people looking at someone's graph could see at a glance whose hours were more compatible with theirs.

I don't know whether this would be better as an add-on for a particular game or chat client, or a free-standing program which you would leave running continually in the background and would do it. If it was integrated with a game, there would be a possibility (only if the player enabled it, of course) of arranging it to send the data to the game's website so it would be searchable by others - a player could search for a specified time, or put in their own graph, and the site would list participating players whose hours matched that most closely.

(Sketches of initial ideas:)



Are other people interested? And, if so, what features would you like to see in it? If there is interest, then I could see about trying to get it made. (I say "get it made" because I'd have to find someone to help me with the programming, as there are things involved that would be beyond my very rusty programming skills.)

All feedback welcome.

(I apologise if this is skating too close to being market research, but I need to ask somewhere, and there are likely to be some people here who do want to know!)

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wombat140

*sighs* S'pose so. I suppose the upshot is, people who aren't Americans shouldn't try to play multiplayer games. Or learn French, then I could play games in French, if there are any. I keep meaning to try that (I think my French and German are good enough that people might be duped into letting me join at least one session before they realise I'm an idiot and holding everyone up).
It really is a pity that there aren't any English-language MMORPGs that are deliberately meant to be Europe-centric. It would be a market niche, surely. Or are there?

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markhawkman

honestly, I'd just use in-game chat to coordinate. The big LFT channels usually have people on all hours.

wombat140

True, that works, if it's a big game like STO and you're just looking for random teammates to do a mission with.

Where I really have the problem is with roleplaying - for that, you often do need to be able to play with the same person repeatedly to finish some shenanigans or other. For me, in various games, it's disappointing, but usual, to embark on some project or other with another player, only to find that them having been available when I was logged in was a freak occurrence and I don't see them again for weeks. Without lurking for days on end and taking notes, there's no way of telling.

The only way, I suppose, is just, every time you join a new game, to post asking point blank if there are any players/fleets that play mainly European hours and would like to add you to their contacts, and hope you're not being annoying. And then receive a flood of answers saying that oh yes, their fleet has "some" European players, which turns out to mean 90% Americans and a few dispirited oddments who are rarely on. It's odd how uncommon it is to see fleets/guilds/whatever that specifically aim at European time zones. I'd have thought that it would be a fairly important criterion for a fleet, actually being around at the same time!

(I can't actually play STO any more, since my laptop only goes up to DirectX 10. I just posted here because it was the best place I could think of to ask, it's got a good big forum and I'm not playing anything really big these days. And I knew I HAD met roleplayers on here with the same problem - I finally found a mainly-European roleplaying fleet a few weeks before I stopped being able to run the game... :-P )

Crash, I can't find the video you mentioned but Muppets rule OK!