Guild Wars 2

Social interaction in MMORPGs tends to be a bit clunky. Developers usually go to some trouble to create animated gestures, but methods for activating them are often too slow to keep up with the pace of conversation. When fast enough, such gestures are useful for general communication and coordination, not just for role playing. Also, the lack of public feedback for UI commands makes it more difficult for other players to make sense of a player’s apparent inactivity or to kitten his or her readiness to travel or fight.

The following are a few small features that would improve players’ ability to interact with each other:

1. Animated gestures can be activated by typing a unique substring of the gesture name (e.g., “/sal” for salute). Makes animated gestures easier to activate quickly.

2. Animated gestures are automatically directed to the targeted avatar or object. Remove the use of @ to direct gestures. Too slow.

3. Enable key binding for animated gestures for quick activation.

4. Animated gestures (e.g., wave, nod, shrug, etc.) appear on weapon bar when Town Clothes are active. Players can assign a gesture to a particular slot like they can with other slot skills. Makes animated gestures easier to activate quickly.

5. Actively stowing weapon displays animated gestures in weapon skill slots. Drawing weapon, activating utility skill or taking damage restore weapon skills to those slots.

6. Animated gesture for open Map (e.g., avatar studies a map). Activates when Map is open. Cancels when Map is closed. Shows other players what a player is doing and that s/he is cut off entirely from the world. Improves group coordination.

7. Animated gestures for other UI windows (e.g., Inventory, Mail, Trading Post, etc.). Unique animation for each. Shows other players what the player is doing. Improves mutual understanding and coordination.

8. Animated gesture for when the player is composing a turn at chat. Improves mutual understanding and coordination. (Alternative is to post chat on a word-by-word basis, like in There.com, but that is a bigger change.)

9. Show in-world chat bubbles when HUD is turned off. Enables you to chat with other players when playing with HUD off (for better aesthetic experience). Note: chat bubbles can still be turned off through Chat Options.