Guild Wars 2

As much as I love Guild Wars 2, there’s an element of the game that’s always been a bit of a thorn in my side – the game forces you to see player names. This is not always a problem, but as a player who values immersion, especially when going through story-oriented PvE content, seeing names like “Random Dude Name” or “Xxx Dark Wolfe Xxx” can be quite jarring and immersion-breaking. While in the ideal world every player would name their characters with clever lore-consistent names, that’s not exactly an easy thing to do every single time and not a very fair thing to ask for. So usually I’m pretty happy just being able to hide player names whenever possible.

Unfortunately, the option “Show Ally Names” in the Options Menu only does the job half way – whenever characters are culled, or whenever you mouse over or point your camera at a character, the game decides to display the character name regardless of this option. The other option is to press Ctrl+Alt+H and hide all of the UI, but that creates more problems than it solves when you’re trying to actually play the game. This used to not be much of a problem until recently, when you could simply guest onto servers with lower population, but now, with the megaservers in place, it’s hard not to get an “Enourmous Dixen” shoved in your face on a fairly regular basis. It’s simply more difficult now to avoid mousing over or pointing your camera at a player because of the larger number of players running around on every map, and that, combined with the fact that some people prefer to give their characters rather silly names, has been making it more and more difficult for me to stay immersed in the game.

I don’t really care if people give their characters silly names, I just want to be able to not see them. So I would like the following options to be available in the settings. In addition to the first two which are already in place:

1. Show Player/NPC/Enemy Names (Displays player/mob nameplates always)
2. Hide Player/NPC/Enemy Names – Automatic (Hides player/mob nameplates, unless looked at, moused over, or culled – this is the current, limited “hide” option available in-game)

A third, new option:

3. Hide Player/NPC/Enemy Names – Always (Hides player/mob nameplates always, regardless of camera direction, mouse-over, or culling)

Thanks

(As a side note, while enemy names constantly doesn’t bother me as much, since it’s necessary information a lot of the time, it is a bit of a shame that most of what I do when I fight enemies is stare at health bars. Being able to turn off Enemy Names completely would be a fun option to play with, and would add quite a bit to immersion as I’d have to pay more attention to the game world itself, rather than floating bits of UI.)

TL;DR: Current “Hide Player/NPC/Enemy Names” only does half the job, make it better pretty please

I know this thread is quite old, but I would like to revive it because I personally feel it is still relevant to my own experience.

For my part, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I am not revealing this to gain sympathy or suggest I am oversensitive about player names; it’s simply a fact about myself. With that said, this topic points to a change I would very much like to see within Guild Wars 2.

Being forced to see player names under mouse cursor and camera direction, names that can range from unnecessary to truly disturbing, causes me to obsess over them and it gets to a point where I don’t even want to play. But that’s just it, I do enjoy playing Guild Wars 2 quite a bit, especially if I can co-op with my brother or a good friend.

I will admit, I am not a game developer and I do not fully understand what it would take to implement this change. I also agree that if a player wants to see names in their favorite game type, that is perfectly fine and I would favor having more options instead of restricting them, especially for no good reason. However, for what my opinion is worth, I think it will be a substantial change for someone like myself to simply have the option not to see names from mouse hover or camera direction.

The option is all I seek. I don’t wish to take away others rights and choices for a game they enjoy playing. But kindly don’t take away mine either.

I sincerely hope ArenaNet looks further into this favorable option. I don’t want to quit playing Guild Wars 2, A game I really do like to play, because the option to simply turn off names in a more controlled and productive way are not introduced.