Guild Wars 2

One of the (hopefully) unintended consequences of the change from regional event dailies (“Ascalon Event Completer,” for example) to zone-specific event dailies (“Fields of Ruin Event Completer,” for example) is that daily events have now devolved into an all-out competition just to tag a mob before it dies. If very many players show up, it is common for some professions with built-in skill-casting/charging times to be unable to even score one damage point due to 10,000 other players all damaging the same mobs at once. Most non-champ event mobs die the instant they spawn.

Accordingly, players tend to “hoard” events, especially in event-poor zones like Snowden Drifts. By “hoard,” I mean that many players are loath to announce events in map chat to avoid being unable to tag event mobs as described above.

We have an objective pointer on our HUD, and it conveniently allows us to turn off Personal Story objectives, presumably leaving only local Events to be pointed to. However, pointing to Events is usurped by:

*unexplored areas
*undiscovered waypoints
*undiscovered POIs
*undiscovered vistas
*"Learn to Dodge" NPCs >.<
…and other useless and/or unwanted (when you’re trying to find events) information.

If any of the above “distractors” exists in the zone, the objective pointer steadfastly refuses to point to events. So, we need some way (PLEASE!) to force the objective pointer to point to events.

Making matters worse, a “Raid Warning” type message frequently explodes onto the middle of the screen, saying “NEW EVENT NEARBY” or similar verbiage, but no further details appear anywhere on the HUD, and with the objective pointer “distracted” as detailed above, the only way to try to actually find the event (unless it spawns right where you’re standing) is to open the map and look for it. Guess what? Most of the time, it’s not shown on the map at all. So the logical question is: why bother screaming to players about a nearby event without providing at least some small clue where it is? Just knowing that there is one “nearby” (whatever that means) doesn’t help a bit without the slightest clue which way to go to find it.

Please consider a separate checkbox list for the HUD/Objective pointer items similar to what we have for chat- we need to be able to FORCE the objective pointer to point to the nearest event in the zone, whether it “wants to” or not, and it would be wonderful to get it to STOP inanely pointing level 80 characters to “learn to dodge” NPCs which didn’t even exist when those level 80 players finished 100% mapping the zone, and turn off Living Story blurbs that keep taking up screen space whether we are interested in that info or not.

Thanks in advance for considering making the HUD actually useful for all levels of players.

or just ignore events, or get 100% completion, its not broken