I'd love to have an artifact that could be made via theory lab or whatever that would tell me whether or not the players that have a planet of mine in their scan is active or not -- basically the governance probe reversed.

Thoughts, feelings?

we already have



if they are not extream slow rankers, most active players will gain 1 or 2 ranks pr week

I guess but it'd just be easier to know

personally id like the flux probe tracer to get a revision, or at least some form of upgrade so that it tells what legion said player belongs to, having somone scan a planet that is rank 100 and in a startup legion of newbs is 1 thing, having a rank 100 scan a planet and that rank 100 is in a well established legion, completely different

+1 knowing the legion would be nice

If you flux probe your planets like you should, this isn't really all that useful:
For any of my valuable planet that I actually care(and probe), if the scanner count just went up, obviously it's from an active guy
For a new "enemy" planet I'm grabbing, governor will tell me if the old owner is active, and if tracer tells me there are more, after popping down whatever structure that I might want that get benefit from other scanners, I flux it.
The only problem would on unoccupied ones. Thou I usually flux it if it have another(after putting down, again, the x other scanned structure where appropriate) anyway, that could be a waste of a flux. But the tracer trick will help here because it's unlikely that the other guy will randomly occupy the planet in the mean time, he could have colonized the planet anytime. Granted, this isn't always true for players under 600, who could have full planets. Most player above that don't.
the psudo-flux is great... Long as you can afford the EM, you can spam them.

All in all, the suggested artifact is very marginally useful.

I had this exact thought a while back, If you have a planet you are considering taking, the owner is Inactive but there are 2 or 3 other scans on it. A way to tell the status of each ship that has it on scan (active / inactive)

+1