These are just suggestions and I hope to start discussions and raise awareness to the developers. I’m sure the suggestions below can be much improved – I just want to put them out there. The pathfinding one I think everyone could support, maybe even the UI scale. Achievements and LFG might be a touchy subject and I’d love to hear your thoughts. If any of this gets the attention of a developer I’d love to know, from one dev to another. I’m sure the devs have good ideas already and I’m sure similar topics exist, but here goes!
Let’s try to keep things on topic:
Please quote the topic(s) you would like to discuss in your reply.
1. UI mode and scalability
Drag and drop interface. Key bound to enter “UI mode” where one can drag and place UI elements freely within the bounds of the current resolution. Coordinates in conjunction with anchor points are to be used (or similar) so that when changing resolution the UI elements keep in “place” relative to the resolution. No save/confirm is required as the coordinates update as you drag your elements, just exit the “UI mode”. Generally these settings are account bound.
We all know about the Small, Medium, Large and Largest interface size settings. However due to upscaling techniques DSR (nVidia) or VSR (AMD) and in all honesty any monitor with a resolution above 1080p, these settings are useless.
On a 1080p monitor upscaled to 4K using said techniques, even “larger” becomes way too small. My suggestion is that when in “unlocked UI mode” every UI element gets a settings cog, wherein a slider for scale appear as well as “make unique for this character” checkbox. This means you can have a “global” setting as well as a “per character” specific setting. Your druid might want the party window wider and much bigger than you would playing a warrior, etc.
I imagine one problem being the “tooltips” or more precisely the “game tips”. If one has scaled the UI these might be off/out of place. I suggest they be bound to their parent container using logic to anchor them left, middle or right based on where its parent is located/anchored.
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2. Pathfinding
Protect that dolyak! Follow this NPC, guard that thing. Whichever the case, mobs in GW2 have a set path to “walk”. If the NPC or otherwise gets aggro or starts attacking, this mob will leave its pre-defined path to deal with whatever needs dealing with. But here’s the point, rather than “understanding” the NPC has actually walked an amount of its pre-defined path, it (like a robot) walks back to the “path point” and then resets. Sometimes “walking back to the path” can be a long run and you feel like: "Why is this mob running the wrong way? Ohh.. he had to “check in” to his path point in order to continue. Sigh." This behaviour is very awkward and to me can get overhauled relatively easy.
The idea here is to “hook” into the code and logic that handles an NPC taking aggro or deviating from its pre-defined path. BEFORE triggering “back to checkpoint, pathpoint or whatnot” let’s check in a ~50yd radius or so where we are and IF we might’ve actually passed a few points on the way already. If so, calculate the closest point from where we are and simply continue from here (skipping those left behind). This “addition” in logic should be applicable globally as a extra check in the default pathfinding algorithms/code.
So to clarify, an NPC spawns and intends to go from A to B. Halfway to B the NPC deviates from it course to take action against whatever foe or otherwise it has to deal with. As is right now, our NPC (regardless of how far it has deviated from its course) always has to return to where it left off in order to continue its planned path. This makes for a very jerky and weird behaviour. And as suggested the NPC should, before returning to its “point of origin” where it left off to deal with whatever, insert a snippet of logic to check the surroundings and alter its course to something closer if possible. Fallback to its normal behaviour if nothing is found.
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3. Linkable achievements (with progress)
Ever been asked to “look in your achievements”? If you don’t know where, there are numerous clicks away until you find what you were looking for.
Let’s allow for achievement chat links:
[Achievement: Undefeated]
Clicking the link spawns a modal/popup that displays the progress of the achievement on the account that sent it. Additionally there’s a button “Go to achievement” or “View achievement” or something like that (like a shortcut for opening achievements and clicking your way to that achievement). The modal stays opened and you can compare that achievement to yours. This is to be tied to the Username.1234 for looking it up using the API? Or whichever solution works. So it’d say Name.1234 on the achievement and display its progress.
What gets sent with the chat link is the account it belongs to as well as the ID of the achievement. What the modal does is basically query the achievement ID for Username.1234, pulls data and displays it. Alongside the Username.1234 optionally the amount of achievement points for said account is displayed instead of having to add this person to your friends list and there view his or her points.
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4. Looking for group/raid requirement(s)
Every so often you see people searching for similarly experienced people to make runs go smooth(er). Unfortunately there aren’t any tools for knowing whether a player has enough knowledge/experience or not. This is abundantly clear when looking at raid LFG’s.
The idea here is to allow for people to tag an advertisement in the LFG-system with “experienced” (with a radio button or so). This sets up some requirements in order for you to join that group. These types of advertisements can be filtered out though.
Dungeons
If you’re looking for more to do Citadel of Flame and ticked “experienced group”, this would mean any player who wants to join would need to have completed it before (e.g. exploration done). This could be configured further by allowing to specify paths and have them as requirements too.
Fractals
If you’re into fractals and want an experienced group to run say level 94 you’d automatically get the lower AR requirement to join (lower would mean if ~140 AR is required it’d accept a 6% margin or so).
Raids
If you’re looking for more to kill Sabetha, and you’ve ticked experienced, it’ll require the person wanting to join to have killed Sabetha before.
If you meet the requirements to join the group you can. Otherwise it’s grayed out (or hidden if filtered out).
The idea here isn’t to neglect people who don’t have knowledge (yet), it’s to find experienced people easier. People are looking for experienced people to save time and knowing that everyone in the group knows what to do helps.
Unfortunately we get unexperienced people joining experienced runs which ultimately ends in them having to be removed and a good chunk of time is wasted for everyone in the entire squad/party (who in this case are experienced).
Experienced groups aren’t for learning, nor should they be. But how will people ever learn if every group is tagged with ‘experienced’?
I’ve read people are having hard times finding groups because a lot of people are already experienced. The point here would be that you can now make a group which isn’t tagged as experienced. You can’t cheese off of groups that are! You will have to learn the way the experienced players once did. If that means you’ll have a harder time finding a group then that’s the hard truth.
As a side note I do believe people who are experienced still need shards and sometimes would join inexperienced groups to get shards and teach “newbies”. I know I have! And oh, sorry for the grammar and so on.