Targetless is required for basic situational awareness.

No it's not.
Situational awareness is definitely a deficiency in the game's default interface and the game's built-in features for this aren't set to have sensible defaults. Most newbies don't know to set up their proximity beep or to check the sector list when you jump to a new sector, but once you learn to do this, it gets a lot less bad.

Rin, implying that plugins have only an aesthetic impact on the game is absurd and you know it. They have clear and distinct functions that give clear and distinct advantages. What you did display in your analogy battle with me, however, is an overcompensated effort to triviliaze plugins.

And ARF, I think you are miscongruing your own highly developed preferences for those of a new player. You know the game, you know what to watch out for. Newbs don't know shit.

I don't see plugins as a cheat.

I agree that the lack of certain plugins is a handicap to new players. This can be overcome in a short amount of time with a bit of direction from more advanced players fairly easily.

Unfortunately I don't think it makes a good impression of GS that new players are almost immediately directed to the plugin links for which they have to exit the game, create a folder, download and extract.

If GS isn't going to incorporate some of the better plugin ideas into the game, then they should consider some way to link the more important plugins to the initial download and install, giving the new player the option of including or excluding them with information about each plugin as an alternative.

"The playing field must be levelled or VO is always going to be a boutique game."

I don't disagree, however I don't see the problem as some people having the "absolutely essential" plugins and others not. I see the problem as certain aspects of the game's UI being deficient to the point that most long-time players consider certain plugins absolutely essential. The solution, therefore is not to nerf plugins, but to enhance the game's UI, especially regarding situational awareness and targeting.

As a first step, the <vendetta_home>/plugins directory should be created by default. I can't count the number of hours I've wasted trying to help someone create a directory that is not Plugin or Plugins or plugin or PLUGIN etc.

"Rin, implying that plugins have only an aesthetic impact on the game is absurd and you know it."

Greenwall, saying that I implied something I did not is absurd and you know it. (Perhaps my comment about sweet shades threw you off; yes, those are primarily an aesthetic accessory compared to lame ones. Running shoes and comfortable clothes, on the other hand, are exactly as important to running as plugins are to playing VO. Full stop.)

"The solution, therefore is not to nerf plugins, but to enhance the game's UI, especially regarding situational awareness and targeting."

Exactly. And the primary thing that needs to happen is to add a notification when people enter and leave the sector, which also happens to be pretty damn easy. That alone would solve 80% of the problem.

This is rather off topic for the thread, but here goes.

...add a notification when people enter and leave the sector...

I don't disagree that something should be done about situational awareness in the default client, but I'm not 100% certain that this is necessarily it. Even if this were added to the default client, the big question that still needs to be answered is how should it be displayed?

Should it display all players or only PCs (similar to how TCS) currently works?
Assuming all players are displayed, there are some large convoys that can cause a lot of chat spam when they jump in, so printing it to chat isn't exactly ideal.

The secondary chat area doesn't always get a lot of use, but it's smaller and having large blocks of text run across it could potentially be distracting. The secondary chat area also can't be scrolled back and it automatically clears itself after a short period. Though I don't see this auto-clearing as a big issue.

Some small on-HUD target list is less distracting, but introduces the potential for lag as the number of players in a sector increases (I've had reports that my MDI TargetList is superior to TargetLess in this regard). On small devices with less useable screen real-estate this is definitely less desirable.

Personally, if some change needed to be made I would lean heavily towards not creating new onscreen objects and going with some form of reporting similar to that of TCS, though definitely not in the main chat window, which really only leaves the secondary chat.

If anyone is interested in seeing how TCS's AlertMachine looks using the secondary chat window then edit alert_machine.lua. Find the function tcs.alm.print and change the line print(output) at the end of the function to HUD:PrintSecondaryMsg(output).

Being able to sort the /toplist so that it puts players at the top would be a good start...

I'd say humans-only, and it doesn't have to include all the data that AlertMachine likes to add. I personally use a modified version of HUM. With my version, when somebody enters and leaves the sector, it looks like this:

(++) DukeMcTarget in a Behemoth
(--) DukeMcTarget

The player name is colored by faction, and the ++ and -- are colored yellow and green respectively. It also has a red !! version if they get into prox range. It just occurred to me now that I could also colorize the ship name based on its health to show that information without having to add more verbosity.

It does still get a bit annoying when a lot of people enter or leave at once. One way to deal with that would be to delay half a second before announcing and allow it to collect a list during that span, and then condense them onto one line without ships. It would look like this:

(++) DukeMcTarget, Jane Dough, PillsberryCheesecake, SpAcE tomahawk92, Trevor

That way it could still be output to the chat window (for the sake of scrolling back if you need to review your encounters) without spamming it to hell. This is a change I'll probably be making to my fork of HUM at some point. That same short delay could also allow me to more gracefully handle people docking/undocking from stations, which currently sends both a left-sector event and an entered-sector event.

I don't know how well a long list like that would fit into the secondary chat window. I'll have to try that out.