Guild Wars 2

These suggestions are technical and are not about game changes. That said…

1) Allow character models to be forced to a generic character model. Everyone is aware that not having your enemies and friendlies rendered is a huge issue. It takes a while to load the character model and render it onto the screen. Assuming the networking protocol is working as intended, this problem could be solved by allowing generic character models to be loaded instead of their real appearance. It will drastically decrease death-by-invisible-player and improve memory usage. We care about defeating our enemies, not their appearance.

2) Keep character models of players in stealth in memory. A player going into stealth is removed completely, which makes sense. However, the issue is that once the character appears again, the game client has to deal with their appearance again, meaning it likely has to receive their appearance information again and start building a character model. A thief can jump in and out of stealth several times making it impossible for directional attacks to affect them, thus forcing a player to rely on area attacks. Please cache the character model until the character is really out-of-range and at that point let the game client know to release the character model. If considered, please don’t make a classical NCSOFT mistake (Lineage/Aion) by sending information about players in stealth. That would give cheaters a huge advantage by allowing them to pinpoint the position of players in stealth, and nobody wants that.

3) Render names of enemies as soon as they come within range and allow selection and attacking of non-rendered enemies. If a group of players runs into the range we would like to see their names appear, even if their character models are not loaded at that point. Allow us to select them and attack them without waiting for character models to load. I’m not sure what the range is, tough, it appears to be between ~2400 range and about five times that much. That said, appearances may be deceiving due to the slow loading speed on a player-by-player basis.

4) Please implement a possibility to hide character models of friendlies and/or enemies. In WvWvW you often come in situations where you fight group versus group. At this point, nobody should care about character appearances, meaning that we do not really need their character models. Combined with point #3, this would allow players on a slower machine to properly participate in WvWvW without running around with 5FPS. After all, character models and animations are the most intensive rendering requirement in any game. Aion, for example, had this and allowed massive castle sieges (200+ attackers) even on moderate hardware.

I hope that these suggestions will be implemented as soon as possible.

Bumping. Maybe with the broken changes to WvWvW someone will care about this ancient post by now.