Guild Wars 2

So how many people work their butts off to get to a glider accessed location such as a mastery point or whatever, and then fall to their deaths trying to land?

I understand that’s how gravity works, but this bit of the game is a flight simulation and the assumption is that my character would be able to use his own eyes to see how high he is when he runs out of lift, allowing him to freefall till he can deploy again and land safely.

Except – it’s not consistant and often you have to work at speeds and angles that don’t allow you to be able to see in a game interface what a “real flying person” would be “able to tell/perceive/determine” if they could really see in 3D and gauge distances.

So please give us an altitude meter of some sort on the UI. I envision something like a vertical level bubble slider or something that would allow me to tell if I am going to die when I fall from this height. So often it looks like Im about to touch down safely and land on my feet when BAM, splat, you have died. Wait wha? Everything around me looked like I was kitten near on the ground. The perspective doesn’t work in a game interface, nor does it work consistently from region to region based on the look of the environment, so we need an indicator.

It’s not fair to spend hours trying to get to a spot and then die and have to waypoint because you splatted when you were SURE you were going to land alright so you didn’t bother to put on the air brakes so to speak.

I know this has to be balanced somehow, because YES falling out of the sky is a certain risk of hang gliding. But the problem I’m yammering about is not because I don’t know how to fly or land or freefall and re-deploy to land alright. It’s because more often than not, you cannot tell when you should have to.

This was a tough thing to articulate, so I hope I’ve described the problem and my solution well enough, but please help me here if anyone else can explain it better. I don’t want training wheels, but I do want a realistic way to guage my height since the UI cannot replicate the “feeling” i would have in “real life” falling towards to earth properly.

For the record I am a former skydiver. I have an idea of exactly what seeing the earth rushing up below you feels like and you can’t always tell there either, but in general, you know if you’re gonna splatter or not in ways the mind perceives that need some sort of replication via an altimeter here.

thanks for reading my rant.

- Sir Cork

Displaying altitude is easy: the game has a z-axis. Displaying height is more complicated, since it varies, depending on your target. I imagine that ANet could present us with vector information instead of a single “distance to target” number, i.e. “POI xyz: 5000 vertical, 2500 horizontal” and that would work for personal markers.

It might also be possible to display x,y,z information as an overlay to the mini map (the API already has that for most landmarks).

Neither of those seem all that complicated. I’d be in favor of adding either/both as options.

However, I can’t agree that this is “desperately needed.” These amount to a very nice quality-of-life improvement. I’ve learned to look at various nearby objects to get a sense of height and the more time I spend gliding, the easier it gets to kitten height even in areas with which I’m less familiar.

tl;dr great idea; doesn’t seem urgent to me in the least.

The idea is not so much to have a numeric value I guess, though that could work as you described. The problem I think is “scale” – since we fly around objects we are not used to IRL, well, am I close or not at all. Like vines in VB or similar. Is that vine Im about to crash on 50 feet wide, or 5? Since there is no relative way for my brain to deduce it’s relative scale until I hit it, I can’t tell if it’s still far away or right under me. This happens a lot to me, and I’ve seen it happening to others as well.

“desperately needed?” – ok you are right Illconceived, that may be hyperbole, but I do tend to just leave areas like Verdant Brink and Forsaken Thicket and not enjoy them because I’m losing to the interface fighting against the level design and not to my lack of flying skill. When a game is frustrating because the boss is tough, that’s one thing, but when it’s frustrating because you cannot tell how far away something is due to how scale and 3d games work vs what we can perceive in reality well, that’s a different kind of problem. And a harder one to solve.

I just feel like a “closer/farther” indicator of somesort would help overcome needless deaths and in a game that needs as much player retention as possible, frustrating us with mechanics as opposed to frustrating us with puzzles and tough bosses is a thing that should be looked at more closely.

It’s an opinion, nothing more, and desperation is in the eyes of the beholder.

I am not here kittening about jumping puzzles being too hard for example. Even though some of them have cost me days of my life to finish. But when I work hard to get to a difficult fly-in loc and become defeated because I can’t tell how high I am vs the environment well, I don’t feel like that would happen to me “IRL” because I can gauge depth perception here in ways the game is missing —-— in MY opinion.

I judge height by my shadow.

However, my PC can run at ultra graphics where I can actually see my shadow. I’m guessing players with lower graphic settings don’t see a shadow at all?

I run on low/medium on a fairly old laptop attached to a 24" flat screen, so you are correct, shadow is not a choice for me. That however does make an interesting option for those that can use it, and potentially I can somehow enable that, so that if it’s doesn’t melt my graphics card, it may help me a lot. Cheers for the tip.

FWIW, I think the assumption is actually that you will unlock unlimited gliding, and never again have to face this problem. It’s fairly reachable in the mastery line, and for current living story content it’s … not required, but highly desirable to unlock ley-line gliding, which is later in the tree.

I’m confused about the value of a “closer|farther” indicator versus just showing the distance. To what point would it be measuring “closer”?

I’m sure that you’re correct that a lot of people have trouble judging scale. But isn’t that a matter of experience rather than something that can be programmed into the game in a way that’s intuitive (and doesn’t require diverting ‘too many’ resources from other projects)?

That said, it seems like it would be valuable to make it possible to see just your shadow (at least while gliding), even if you’re running on “best performance” settings. That also seems more likely to get implemented soon or soon™.

As has been pointed out z information is easy but that is not what you want. What you really need is the delta between your current z and the z of the first item you will intersect. Given items under you may be moving it is not as easy as looking up what is at the highest z under you at your x,y either. It is one of those cases where a human eye/brain is doing deceptively many more calculations than you think.

What I do is fall a little ways then deploy my glider for a few seconds. Then turn off my glider so it can keep recharging and repeat. By doing this I fall a huge distance but according to the game it was only a short distance (rightly it seems to not calculate over the highest z when you do this, I assume your relative velocity when you hit the ground is what matters and this procedure minimizes that).

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, I think the assumption is actually that you will unlock unlimited gliding, and never again have to face this problem. It’s fairly reachable in the mastery line, and for current living story content it’s … not required, but highly desirable to unlock ley-line gliding, which is later in the tree.

Not sure how that will change the problem, as the problem being discussed isn’t gliding persay, it’s landing.

In skydiving, we joke that skydiving won’t hurt you, but landing might.

Menadena.7482:

What I do is fall a little ways then deploy my glider for a few seconds. Then turn off my glider so it can keep recharging and repeat. By doing this I fall a huge distance but according to the game it was only a short distance (rightly it seems to not calculate over the highest z when you do this, I assume your relative velocity when you hit the ground is what matters and this procedure minimizes that).

This is how I try to cope with it too, but sometimes I’d swear I’m about to be boots on the ground and get slapped anyway. I can’t possibly be the only person experiencing this, am I?

Why don’t you just re-deploy the glider while you are falling if you think that you’re falling a distance that will damage you? Even just a “tap-tap” To deploy and stow the glider while you are falling will slow your descent enough to prevent you from taking too much damage most of the time…

I just deploy the glider when I’m about to land. Is not what most people do? There are some hard to guess angles, and sometimes I press the wrong key at the wrong moment… but it is really rare.
A height meter would be interesting to have, but I doubt I would really use it, specially when trying to land. Gliding in GW2 is not a simulation of reality, it has its own rules you need to get used to.

SirCork.1069:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, I think the assumption is actually that you will unlock unlimited gliding, and never again have to face this problem. It’s fairly reachable in the mastery line, and for current living story content it’s … not required, but highly desirable to unlock ley-line gliding, which is later in the tree.

Not sure how that will change the problem, as the problem being discussed isn’t gliding persay, it’s landing. In skydiving, we joke that skydiving won’t hurt you, but landing might.

I guess I misunderstood: I appreciate the “missed the ledge” bit is annoying, but I thought they failure mode being discussed was “…and then I fall to my death because I run out of glide time.”

Since I missed the point, my comment probably was pointless, haha.