Guild Wars 2

They make hiding far too difficult, removing the ability for organised sides to create effective ambushes.

I don’t see any possible justification for it, they are ugly, don’t provide any information that armor color wouldn’t and turns things from a 3d game in to a 2d text adventure when the zerg gets big enough.

Am I missing something fundamental here?

here’s what I think would be great:

enemy names appear only if you can see some part of their body.
If someone’s whole body is behind a tree, then the name doesn’t appear. I’m pretty sure this could be implemented without having to write too much code or using more network resources.

This would have to be client-side (because tracing rays is expensive CPU work) and thus would be easily hackable.

No.

As for the OP, names need to stay. In a lot of cases I can only see the name, and not the model, when things get zergy.

I think it would be easier a “dynamic quality”.
Right now you can choose how many and how good looking you want them, but I would like to have these changed dynamically, in a zerg the quality would automatically drop while on smaller fights it would raise, this would be done client side so no impact on the servers.

And like this you could actually have the name plates off, I don’t like to have them on but if I turn them off I automatically get in a disadvantage point because they are such a give away.

Seeing enemy names is just Stupid. Unless mousing over the enemy.

The reminds me of the radar on COD. Where good players who don’t use the radar are at a disadvantage to skilless noobs. Who just sneak behind other players using the radar. No one fights that away in the military.

Anet don’t make WvW COD! Make enemy names mouse over only. This includes health bars, and enemy commander tags.

It goes against immersion and the feeling of “the fog of war”.

Truga.5897:

This would have to be client-side (because tracing rays is expensive CPU work) and thus would be easily hackable.

No.

As for the OP, names need to stay. In a lot of cases I can only see the name, and not the model, when things get zergy.

Ray tracing is being done already, whether client or server-side. Not including the name tags in the ray tracing computations would be equally or less computationally intensive, no?

By the way, do you think the decision to render or not to render is being done server-side currently?