I recently started playing GW2 and have been in love with WvW from the beginning, however enemy nameplates seem to be a bit lacking, especially since the culling issue being resolved. Here is a simple idea which might improve nameplates.
The problem for me is that enemy nameplates are to big and clutter the screen up in large battles. Also, I feel as though they give away a players position entirely to easy from a distance. It seems a bit weird that a character can be hiding behind a huge cliff, but an enemy can easily spot me because my nameplate is visible around the edge of the cliff. IMO, it takes away from tactical positioning of not only single chars, but also zergs.
A change that would be nice to see is scaling of nameplates with character size. No matter where the character is at on the map, the nameplate will be at a scale equal to the character’s model. This way, you can stand behind a tower, wall, or hill and remain out of line of sight from an enemy that is far off.
Another change that might help with the clutter of nameplates in large battles is the option to change the nameplate to an icon rather than a string of text. All enemies of another server have the same text, <Servername Rank Guild>. It doesn’t really define the character any more than what server they are on, so why not give us the option to show a red icon above the character.
Attached are a few screens I created to show the difference and give a feel of what it could be like. The first is what it currently looks like, the second is a scaled nameplate, and the third is an icon.
