Guild Wars 2

Probably not the right place to ask, but as googling for the answer has not been particularly beneficial, here goes.

GW2 makes fairly extensive use of the ‘get out of the red circle!’ thing, so much so that at times I wonder why the devs bothered to make fancy graphics for the bad guys and monsters and didn’t just go with red circles themselves as the bad guys and monsters.

I don’t recall encountering (or noticing, anyway) any such ‘red circles’ prior to the ‘Death From Below’ addition to the sewers in Atlas Park (in City of Heroes) in 2011, but I’ve seen (or noticed it, anyway) it in some other MMOs since then.

So what I’m wondering is, where did this game mechanic come from? Is it found in games other than MMOs? Why does GW2 make so much use of it? Also, is it generally considered a good thing?

It is fully possible to turn them off if you don’t like them ^^

As for the question at hand I believe there have been AoE-marks for quite some time but I have no clue who started it.

First I ever saw of it was in a very popular add on in WoW. I’d prefer they did the indicators as an integrated part of the spell/skill effect but the rings are good for knowing right where the edges are. Even if only having a toe in them counts as a hit. :-p

The purpose of the red circles was to identify the particle effects from bad ones. Since you can use combo fields, things like a frost field will look hostile to players and they would end up avoiding safe area of affects.

Because of this, all ally fields are covered in a white line while hostile ones are red. This feature has been in since the very early stages of development, because the idea was to eliminate the trinity but use combo fields for synergy.

Also, the red circles makes it easier to notice the effects without having to rely on secondary interface to complain to you about it (such as deadly boss mods). Therefore, the effects are much more deadly than compared to other games, since you get an obvious notification about it.