Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I want to state up front that this idea is not related to the removal or alteration of local functionality in any way. It just represents a more efficient way to display the information we already have at our fingertips by streamlining the interface to remove some tedious and pointless elements.

Currently in order to tell who is in space in the same solar system, we have the "local" menu. A couple years back CCP added overview tags which made it possible to tell whether there are hostiles in the same system from a quick scroll through the menu, and this was a dramatic improvement. However, the interface is still unwieldy. In both empire and nullsec, it is common to enter situations where you occupy a system with hundreds of other pilots. Trying to identify the numbers of friendlies, neutrals, wardecs, etc. is troublesome and annoying, as the user has to scroll through the entire list counting icons. It is common for fleet commanders to ask volunteers to count the number of hostiles in local by scrolling through the list - a tedious and annoying task. Want to figure out if there are any wardecs in Jita? Have fun scrolling through 700 names. Want to figure out if your fleets are overmatched in a fleet battle? Hope you have volunteers to do some careful counting.

I propose an alternate implementation of the list of names in local. Rather than display every pilot in order, the list should be implemented as a series of collapsible interface elements based on standings. For example, in a system with 100 pilots, rather than see every pilot in the list with their name and overview tag, a more efficient representaiton might be as follows:

+Alliance (10)
+Corporation (8)
+Light Blue (6)
+Dark Blue (8)
+Neutral (23)
+Wardec (5)
+Orange (12)
+Red (15)
+Fleet (13)

If I want to check whether a particular pilot is in the same system, I can click on the "+" icon to see a drop-down list of all pilots in that category. This list could perhaps be configurable in the same manner as color tags to only display those statuses deemed relevant by the user. The client has this information already due to the ability to display color tags, so why not allow us a more efficient way to sort and access the data, rather than providing everything in a huge, unwieldy list?