Suggestion: Player-modifiable status indicator and/or text

[MimeRifle]

Apologies in advance if this idea or variant has been hashed and re-hashed. Trying to avoid that, I searched several phrases I would expect to be used and saw a couple of conversations back in June of this year making similar suggestions and didn't see much follow up to it.

I think it would be really helpful to have a presence/status indicator and/or status text that a player could assign to their character while online. Similar to IM clients work. It wouldn't necessarily have to be visible on the toon, though a great suggestion was made back in June that the little X,O,triangle vanity icons could be made to "mean" something, simpler yet a red/green dot hovering near the toon would work.

In order of preference my suggestions for Character Status indicators would be:

1. A short status message (preferably with a timestamp showing when it was updated) the player can set that would be visible on their Avatar screen. With no additional features, this could be used to communicate anything from "AFK for a few min" to "Looking for a party to run such-and-such campaign" to "Interested in buying item xyz."
2. Having #1 accessible from the friend/guild list somehow would be awesome (as you can't reach the avatar from there).
3. Visible presence indicator perhaps with a few stock statuses to toggle. (red/green light, maybe "available", "no not disturb", "AFK", etc.) Again - the message could serve that purpose pretty well also, but maybe some designs would be more technically feasible than others.

I beg your pardon if this was redundant. Interested to hear how realistic this idea is and what other players' thoughts are on it. Be well!