Guild Wars 2

A little bit of me always cringes when I come up to a giant battle in WvW with dozens of players, spells flying, catapults hurling giant fireballs in the air, gates being broken down and then having all this awesomeness covered in a sea of red text names. There has to be a better way. One that doesn’t pull you out of the moment. One that doesn’t reduce some of the best moments in the game to a mess of text. Granted, I could just turn enemy nameplates off I guess but that would put me at a huge disadvantage and doesn’t really solve the other problems that always on nameplates cause for eveyone playing.

How about only having nameplates visible on enemies that are selected by you or the friendly players in your vicinity?

This would have several benefits. It would increase immersion as it would become less about scouring the screen for red names and more about scouring the screen for PEOPLE. It would also drastically decrease the visual noise in giant battles and you would actually be able to see the beautiful spell effects and player models and probably be able to get a better idea of what was actually going on. It would make it much easier to focus fire on enemies since only enemies that someone in your vicinity has selected would have a nameplate visible. It would also add a new level of tactics. Stealth, sneak attacks and having scouts actually able to sneak into enemy territory instead of being visible from hundreds of yards out. Being able to hide from your enemy in general is a huge aspect of combat tactics that are eliminiated by always on nameplates. Just a thought. The rest of the game is so innovating and inventive turning conventions on their head. This is another convention that I think could use some head turning.

Love the game by the way. Having played prettymuch all of the big mmo’s since WoW came out I can honestly say this is probably the best new MMO experience I have ever had. Keep up the great work. Can’t wait to see what awesomeness you guys pull off next!