Some dev thought 1/3 of the screen was redundant?

And he filled it with a block with glowing orbs?

In multiplayer, that is. Returning to the game with BNW a friend and I fired up a game, only to discover there is a huge part of the screen occupied with a huge, pointless block with shiny orbs. I am not sure why anyone thought this was a good idea, as it seems to add nothing at all and takes up 1/3 of the screen. Is there any way to remove this abomination?

Huh? Do you have a screenshot?

Yea its certainly an incredibly stupid feature. And no I don't think there is a way to remove it. It serves no purpose that the previous highlighting/dehighlighting of names didn't serve before

It should be removed. Also - The idiot who added kicking into multiplayer games without having the game as a whole voted should rethink his work. This is one of the few aspects where Civ 4 was superior actually, in that it took more than a majority of a group to agree on kicking a nonresponsive player. Playing in NQ means you don't have to deal with that problem, but because of stupid implementation, the multiplayer team effectively destroyed public multiplayer games with that one feature in one swoop.

Now a poor host can choose to kick whoever he/she wants for whatever reason even if the rest of the game doesn't want a player kicked. Again, this is why no one should play Public Multiplayer unlike NQ and Civ Players - but it is still a completely idiotic feature