Guild Wars 2

For me, the one on the “zoning” screen is fine. The one permanently on the UI is mildly irritating and I would turn it off if the option was there but it’s not a biggie.

The whole eSports thing is not really my cup of tea but it is only going to get bigger. A few years ago you couldn’t conceive of anyone being able to make a full-time living from playing games but now it is a reality, to the extent that one gaming team has just been “sold” to a new “owner”. I don’t know whether GW is the right platform for that stuff but I do know that it was the main reason for the recent toning down of the combat graphics. Spectators need to be able to see the players rather than a screen full of fire or whatever.

The main obstacle eSports needs to conquer is the not-real nature of it. You are asking spectators to sit and watch animated gladiators rather than real ones. It’s hard to connect/empathise/connect with pixels, and it’s hard for a competitor to convey an image/brand/personality.

(And please can I have my fireball back).

For crying out loud…. it’s one line at the top of each loading screen.

At least it isn’t in the MIDDLE of the screen this time.

If this is seriously ruining your day, you need to get out more.

warbignime.4610:

This thread…. What are you serious????!! It’s a tiny fraction on top right of screen and one piece of text on loading screen. It’s like saying I don’t care about story instance so Anet have to remove it from my ui. Honestly anyone QQ about this might as well rage at every thing in life. Forum once again has blown my mind with how whiny people can get over nothing.

Then why post? This thread is not for you. Never use the hypothetical future option to turn off PvP announcements.

I don’t want to see it either. It’s in the way.

I’ve always though of e-sports as glorified key-pushing.

How does ArenaNet make money from this esport thing?

Punter.7648:

How does ArenaNet make money from this esport thing?

Stream advertising would be my guess.

Punter.7648:

How does ArenaNet make money from this esport thing?

My guess is that at heir current viewership they don’t. They probably subsidize it with HoT expansion money in the hopes they can attract enough viewers to generate a profit.

I don’t mind the spam during loading screens; I don’t find it offensive or immersion breaking, or anything.

However, the in-game UI, especially the upper right corner, is cluttered enough as it is. I wish they would give us the option to turn it off (all of it, not just the PVP spam, but the personal story, raid announcement, dailies, etc.). A few check boxes in the options menu would go a long way.

Furthermore, I agree with the above poster that ANet should immediately drop this whole pursuit, and focus on their MMO. It’s a shame that with the game in such a shambles, they’re diverting valuable resources to this e-sport nonsense. That’s just my opinion, but there you have it.

Oh noes i see a message about something i dont care about on a loadscreen. I may have to turn my head 5sec away cause this is annoying as kitten!

Might as well call the tv station saying “man these adds all and nice, but idc about it, remove it!”

At least let us opt out of all the ads for it.

My loading screen really? are the twitch numbers so bad?

Neural.1824:

Tapioca.9062:

I care less about esports than I do about regular sports. I am sick of Anet trying to shove players where they don’t want to be though.

They are obsessed with this “esport” fantasy to the point that they seem willing to damage the rest of the game in order to force things to happen.

What they need to do is drop it and focus on running an MMORPG.

I second this. If it’s not working, it’s not working. Their only hope is to stop wasting all kinds of resources promoting it and embarrassing themselves and instead focus on crafting a better game.

More control in general over the top-right GUI would be nice. Anything up there that’s just a news headline should be dismissible. What’s news today is an annoyance tomorrow, even if you do care about the message.

Esports here is gonna FLOP Harder then Jim Henson did on SNL…

<.< ……… >.>

Having a MOTD with this crap is fine even though I’d appreciate a way to opt out since I couldn’t care less about it. But the stupid thing being on the screen that I can not remove is annoying, lame, pushy, invasive, etc. There is not a good reason for not giving us the option to turn it off. I feel like their goal is to slowly push crap until we have a sidebar full of adds that we have no control over.

It is not so much that they are an eyesore currently; although they kind of are. It is that, like any commercial for a product you have no interest in, it will most likely only get more pronounced as time goes by.

I am sure in the early years of TV many of the commercials were considered a “cute” way to sell your product but look at where we are now!

Tommyknocker.6089:

It is not so much that they are an eyesore currently; although they kind of are. It is that, like any commercial for a product you have no interest in, it will most likely only get more pronounced as time goes by.

I am sure in the early years of TV many of the commercials were considered a “cute” way to sell your product but look at where we are now!

Actually the opposite has happened. On the top right in game, its a tiny notification, that I never noticed until this thread, because there’s ALWAYS stuff there anyway. And on the loading screens It used to be in the middle, but now they changed it to the top in a thin header.

Obviously that’s not enough though. GW2 should d o whatever we want, whenever we want only about the things we like as individuals. The fact that that’s impossible is only a minor difficulty.

It’s not the small notice on the screen, it’s the $200,000.00 reward.
Where’s that come from?
Yeah, I thought so. UGH!

The only thing I can possibly think of that I would hate more than PvP’ing
would be trying to watch it.

If there’s anyone here that does watch this though, can you please tell us how wonderful it is to see everything going on now, cause I still cant see anything in a boss fight.

yep… your pre purchase of hot that you now hate… is going to a super finite player base of elitests that are laughing all the way to the bank. Enjoy your stay here at ArenaNet!

Punter.7648:

How does ArenaNet make money from this esport thing?

I doubt they are making money. Usually the prize money comes from sponsors. You get enough sponsors on board for X dollar amount and you make that the prize pool. Any item prizes like graphics cards, peripherals, software, etc. are all donated from sponsors as well.

With the size of GW2 Esports scene, my guess is if they aren’t sponsored at all (I honestly haven’t looked to see if they are), that the money put up as prize money comes from their marketing budget. $200,000 is pretty easy to come by if they cut some web ads on certain sites for a few months. That or NCSoft HQ is putting in the money from their marketing budget.

I know the company I work for isn’t nearly as big as NCSoft and we have a $1.25mil marketing budget. So I can only assume NCSoft has a much bigger one and $200,000 of it for a tournament to try and legitimize GW2 as an eSport is a worthwhile investment.

this complaint is ridiculous

its just in the loading screen

there is nothing that it would block you from seeing and it is not distracting you at all while playing …it is just in the loading screen

i find it really good and about time that they finally start to advertise these things ingame

most likely no new player and probably 90% of only PvE players would never know about this if this wasnt announced actually ingame so i think its nice way for players to see it there

or if they annoy you so much get a proper SSD so you dont have loadingscreens

Orangensaft.7139:

this complaint is ridiculous…

its just in the loading screen!!

Is also on in game UI all time with no way to turn off.

Draknar.5748:

Punter.7648:

How does ArenaNet make money from this esport thing?

I doubt they are making money. Usually the prize money comes from sponsors. You get enough sponsors on board for X dollar amount and you make that the prize pool. Any item prizes like graphics cards, peripherals, software, etc. are all donated from sponsors as well.

With the size of GW2 Esports scene, my guess is if they aren’t sponsored at all (I honestly haven’t looked to see if they are), that the money put up as prize money comes from their marketing budget. $200,000 is pretty easy to come by if they cut some web ads on certain sites for a few months. That or NCSoft HQ is putting in the money from their marketing budget.

I know the company I work for isn’t nearly as big as NCSoft and we have a $1.25mil marketing budget. So I can only assume NCSoft has a much bigger one and $200,000 of it for a tournament to try and legitimize GW2 as an eSport is a worthwhile investment.

Spending $200k on pulling a maximum of 9,000 viewers (I’d like to see the whole set of numbers on that, like viewing minutes per, uniques, etc ) means $22 spent per viewer – which is a terrible use of marketing spend. Adding it to the UI and STILL only getting 9000 views tells you how bad a fail it is in terms of numbers- that’s less than 1% of say 1m active players bothered to look at something that is a part of a game they actually play!

My bug bear isn’t really the forced advert on the loading screen, nor the UI permanent ad, it’s the fact they spent 200k on the failed ‘e-sport’s rather than on something useful like a few extra devs on wvw.

Maybe they should cancel the next ‘season’ and spend the money on fixing wvw instead.

The difference between Guild Wars and GW2 is that watching matches and GVGs in Guild Wars was fun, and you could learn a lot about builds, tactics, splits, etc. In GW2 it’s just a mess of particle effects, you have to turn off the breathless screaming commentary, and no matter how much you watch you won’t know anything about builds being used or tactics – and much of it boils down to camping a point and moving to engage 2v1.

I clicked on it. I’m not sure why anyone would watch it though. Just about the time I would get invested in a fight, they would shift to another. Very annoying. I don’t think Ill do that again. Maybe I can find one of them streaming.

Anyway I don’t know much about this pro league? The episode I was watching it was 8 teams. I hope that isn’t all of them. I guess I was just a bit disappointed. I expected more. but maybe I missed some rounds or something.

Although I did find it funny that hours after it was over there was the banner and quest tracker still crying look at me in a desperate bid for attention.

Not too happy to see this up in game. I am sure there will be a gem store option to have a ad remover tool

Funny how the visuals of so many spells are getting ruined because it’s cluttering up the view for those e-sport twits but they can clutter up our screen with their garbage constantly.

Draknar.5748:

With the size of GW2 Esports scene, my guess is if they aren’t sponsored at all (I honestly haven’t looked to see if they are), that the money put up as prize money comes from their marketing budget. $200,000 is pretty easy to come by if they cut some web ads on certain sites for a few months. That or NCSoft HQ is putting in the money from their marketing budget.

They explicitly list Alienware, Corsair, Nvidia, and Sennheiser as “partners”. Arenanet is also self publishing at this point so it’s highly unlikely that NCsoft wold foot any of the bill.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/proleague/#partners

What’s the big deal? All I saw was some small text on the loading screen?

misterman.1530:

Misguided.5139:

Most of the time I think this kind of complaint is silly, but I have to agree in this case. I understand this is important to them and they want to promote it. But I could care less. An option to not see a given message again would be appreciated. I would prefer not to have it cluttering up the screen the entire time I play and every time I zone.

You “…could care less”, which implies you care a little. Or did you mean you “….couldn’t care less”?

https://xkcd.com/1576/

Also… Dear ANet.

I can’t help but think that you’re wasting your money on this. Maybe you don’t need money any more. I’ll keep that in mind.

Sincerely,
A Whale.

+1

As if I need a reminder why attempting to get a legendary could ultimately be pointless.

Wow I have never notist this till after I read this thread, why is this a problem I had to get in game and see what all the issues is about. Sorry but if anyone has an issue with this they really need to get a life. You are spending way to much time in this game to let a little thing like this bother you. Please if there is a moderator in the forums right now please lock this thread this is ridiculous!

Nova Stiker.8396:

I have nearly 6,000 PvP games and have been playing around since beta.

I must say proudly annoucing a cash prize in an unbalanced and buggy mess is an insult to Esports. Adding more insult to injury is the very small PvP community.

Stop it ArenaNet.

But it is “balanced” when everyone picks the same OP classes and specs ^_^

Palador.2170:

misterman.1530:

Misguided.5139:

Most of the time I think this kind of complaint is silly, but I have to agree in this case. I understand this is important to them and they want to promote it. But I could care less. An option to not see a given message again would be appreciated. I would prefer not to have it cluttering up the screen the entire time I play and every time I zone.

You “…could care less”, which implies you care a little. Or did you mean you “….couldn’t care less”?

https://xkcd.com/1576/

Also… Dear ANet.

I can’t help but think that you’re wasting your money on this. Maybe you don’t need money any more. I’ll keep that in mind.

Sincerely,
A Whale.

Yes, the correct term is “couldn’t care less”.

In other words, it would not be possible for you to care less about the issue.

“Could care less” would imply you do care, at least somewhat.

OT, but if they call people who spend, say, $1,000+ per year on a game “whales”, wonder what they call people who spend a few $100s?

Dolphins?

Porpoises?

Agemnon.4608:

Nova Stiker.8396:

I have nearly 6,000 PvP games and have been playing around since beta.

I must say proudly annoucing a cash prize in an unbalanced and buggy mess is an insult to Esports. Adding more insult to injury is the very small PvP community.

Stop it ArenaNet.

But it is “balanced” when everyone picks the same OP classes and specs

QFT.

Can’t say I’m that bothered by them promoting it.

Although, I’m not really interested in watching it, either.

Personally I like e-sports and watching others play games. However not a big fan of the UI clutter. However again I know it will be gone eventually so I just don’t bother focusing on it while it’s up. Maybe work on a way to dismiss those messages per gaming session. Sort of like Anet saying; ‘Yo, this is going on, you interested?’ and I can just go; ‘Not right now thanks.’ click an x and it goes away, but will come back next time I log in incase I change my mind.

As for loading screens, I do like that they moved the words to the top of the screen rather than dead center like they usually do. But either way, it’s a loading screen. Something I and everyone else has seen hundreds/thousands of times. Do you guys really care that much about what’s on the loading screen that appears for a few seconds before you get to your destination?

Like, I’m sure these loading screens have been uploaded online. Just alt-tab to your browser and look at the pictures if words being over your loading screen bugs you so horribly.

I’m sorry but this is a really petty complaint to be making.

You can’t expect a community that gets farmed by 5 man groups to really put much stock in competitive play.

That being said I think this is a ridiculous thing to complain about. What resolution are you playing at where this is a problem for you?

My only beef is when I click the link and have to watch one of those crappy GW2 Rubi shows. When I click the link, I expect to be watching ESL or a countdown to ESL, not some crappy pve thing.