Guild Wars 2

(This post will be divided in two since it exceeds the message body length)

Hi to GW2 players, be it PvP, PvE, WvW or any other kind of community that might be on here. I’m here to address my concerns about a seemingly very very tiny change that actually wiped off a huge part of my interest into the game, you already guessed by the title of this thread: the changes that has been applied to how /emote, /e or /me works in game.

For the people who did not notice this yet, prior to the patch, when you were typing an emote with the commands above, you had something looking like this.

Hystery is posting a thread on the forums.

However, after the patch, the emotes appear as the following:

Hystery: Hystery is posting a thread on the forums.

As some people could think it’s a minor and trivial change which doesn’t need to be addressed as a “problem”, I would like to enlighten them to my point of view as a roleplayer on GW2.

As you may or may not know, the purpose of roleplaying is to make your character act as a sentient person into the game, to create a background to him or her, a storyline, and play your character as a puppet, or as another example, as if you were an actor playing your character’s role. It’s a way like another to spend time on a game and have fun, just like some people like to do dungeons or some others like to bash other players’ faces in PvP/WvW. Though, for the roleplay to be possible, we need to have an immersive universe that allows us to be wrapped into, to feel inspired and create great things. Guild Wars 2, until the April feature pack, wasn’t particularly roleplay-unfriendly. We had the possibility to emote like in any other MMO, the town clothes allowed us to cloth our characters properly with some mix and match, and some servers (Tarnished Coast and Piken Square for the US and EU) were even described as unofficial Roleplaying Servers.

After the April feature pack, the roleplaying community already had a huge kick in the balls. With the sudden and unprepared arrival of the Megaserver, a lot of us got spreaded up amongst plenty of different shards of the map, making the casual roleplay (aka starting to roleplay with strangers like someone would start to discuss with a stranger in a bar, a club, a gaming convention or any other public place) very difficult to happen, other people mocking us, trolling us and bullying us, forcing us to stop our activities. The sudden removal of town clothes also made our community wince with the abrupt lack of creativity and immersion in our characters’ outfits, making it difficult to have empathy towards the characters we created from scratch and love. After weeks of tweaking, the Megaserver eventually allowed us to be in the same instance as other people of our server again, making the whole thing a bit less hard to swallow despite a good part of the character customization was gone with the town clothes (RIP).

Then occurs the September feature pack. I won’t mention the several changes that have been discussed in the other threads, I have my opinion on them already. However, this change on the emote system is ruining once more our desire to roleplay within this universe we all love. As I said above, a succesful and enjoyable roleplaying session is all based on immersion, just like a good story is enjoyable to read if it’s immersive and correctly written. Though, with that change of the emote system, the name of our characters are appearing twice in the same sentence, ruining completely the atmosphere of the actual roleplay session, sending us back to our place of writter on a keyboard instead of actor in a fantasy universe.

I have read here and there that the reasons for those changes were to allow people to right click on the player’s nickname and be able to report them or mute them if they wanted to. To that, I would answer two things:

1. If someone wants to report a roleplayer, they’ll most likely be able to right click on te roleplayer’s green name in the chat when he’ll type a regular sentence, since we communicate via emotes for our characters actions, and via regular chat for their words.
2. If someone wants to report a regular GW2 player actually spamming the /dance or /scared emotes in the chat, well… It simply doesn’t work since those simple emotes are not affected by those changes to the emote system and remain as they were prior to the patch, as in you’ll be unable to right click on the emote to make the usual chat menu appear.

From there, I have two questions.

• Why this change? I actually would like a real reason, because so far, it is pointless, it is a feature that none asked for.
• Why simply not making the players’ name clickable no matter it’s an emote or not, instead of putting twice the player’s name in the chat?

(Second part following)

(Sequel of the first part)

I know that for some people, this change is insignificant and won’t ever change their way to play the game. But to those, I would like to say that, if one day Anet drastically changed the way you play dungeons or PvP to something that completely ruins your gaming pleasure just by a single thing, wouldn’t you like some people to stand with you to talk about your unsatisfaction of this change? This change to the emote system, despite seeming trivial, is completely ruining the fun we, roleplayers, had in the game by breaking the immersion we want and need to actually enjoy the game in our way.

Some people could also think that the roleplaying community is expendable, as it doesn’t bring anything to the game. But a lot (if not everyone) of us are also doing the same activities as the others: PvE, PvP, WvW. More importantly, we also contribute like any other player to the gemstore, maybe even more, since our character’s appearance is very important for the said and repeated immersion. After all, who would believe that someone’s character is a commoner if he’s actually roaming around in a shiny armor instead of casual clothes.

Thanks to people who read this from the beginning to the end, and thanks in advance to people bringing some feedback or support, or their own opinion on the subject as long as it’s respectful and argumented.

Hystery, a hurt GW2 player and roleplayer.

It seems so redundant. I wouldn’t say it’s killed RP… but a reason would be nice and I’d like to ask: anet you spent some time on emotes AND DIDNT GIVE US NEW ONES?!

Heh. Thanks for posting this.

This. Just all of this. I applaud you for how well you have worded and conveyed every sentiment I feel about the situation. So please Anet, pay attention. We are begging you not to forget the RPer community.

Morsheira.6102: Morsheira.6102 asks you to please take a look at how this truly appears.

The reason is that the first instance of the name, before the colon, is interactive. You can click to block/report on it. However, my biggest complaint is people who spam non-custom emotes over and over again, and those emotes weren’t effected. No way to ignore the /dance x1000 people yet.

I don’t understand why they made that change; it doesn’t make much sense to me, unless they just really wanted their chat to be uniform like that. Still I’m having a very hard time finding any sympathy for the hardcore RP section of the playerbase. You might want to check out DnD; I think you’d like it.

I appreciate the ability to click the name of a custom emoter. However, the “immersion breaking” part of this comes from what the OP mentioned about RP integrating our characters into the world.

Doubling up the name gives the impression the character is describing his/her actions rather than doing them, and shifts the feeling over to watching people block out a scene to be acted instead of acting it. Like they’re reading the script.

Sort of like a certain Gotham Dark Knight who instead of saying “I’m Batman,” says, “Batman says ’I’m Batman.’” Or like those voiceover tracks on movie disks for the blind describing the action in flat boring tones.

That is an awesome post and I cannot give I enough +1s

Also there’s another thread for this started in the Bugs section. As surely this is not working as intended. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/BROKEN-Emote-Double-Name-Range/page/2#post4389697

Murke: Murke really hopes it’s not working as intended.

I’ve been RPing in this game for 2 years now and I can honestly say that out of 5 years of RPing, GW2RP has been by far the most enjoyable. I’ve had tons of fun creating my character and using the lore of the game to just make the stories in my head reality, but honestly?

First, it was the enormous Emote range issue which is extremely annoying and hasn’t been fixed since the day it was implemented.

Then came the Megaservers. I won’t even mention the chaos it created amongst RP Guilds. People asking to Taxi each other from one shard to another, looking for -hours- for spontaneous RP, the diffirent Server Shards making Public RP Events a living -hell-. It killed a huge amount of the RP community, making them go to other MMOs where such type of thing didn’t really exist.

After that, you took away our Town Clothes. “Oh my god, relax, it’s just town clothes, you can find something else to give your character to wear or whatever.” No, it doesn’t go like this. I think you can at least imagine how much of a pet peeve it is for Heavy Armor characters to not have -anything- casual to wear, and when they do, it’s those ‘Outfits’ where customization is less than limited. The Immersion was trampled.

And now, after -all- these stuff we have this new.. ‘plague’ called Name Duplication, or whatever. Not only did we have all these problems I mentioned earlier, now we are forced to see the spam get even bigger and the eyesore intensify. If you wanted to make the names clickable, you could have easily made it without duplicating the name. So, if it’s not a bug, for me it seems you just did it on purpose so you will actually poke the RPers with a stick. Having seen both RP Guilds and PvE guilds, I will say that the RPers spend A LOT more Gems than the PvErs do, mainly because we will do anything for the appereance of our characters. So, basically, after giving you all this money, you practically spat on our faces.
I don’t feel ‘sad’ nor hurt. I feel offended. I literally feel as if the Developers gave us the Middle Finger.

Anyway, the thing is, if you -can’t- revert the changes or make them optional for whatever reason, at least tell us -why- you did this change. Give us a solid explanation we have to go through this as well. And congrats to the OP for expressing the thoughts of the most part of the RP community.

It’s annoying but I really doubt they are going to fix it.

they do not care at all about us. ex: last 2 feature packs.

Anet simply doesn’t care about RPers, for whatever reason this may be. I’d just attribute it to the incompetence they seem to be displaying in many other updates they’ve given.

Everything pales in comparison to the Megaserver update. There are many, many problems that it caused that I will not go into now, other than simply summing up that it killed a great deal of open world random RP.

I too was annoyed about this most recent change, but upon hearing that we could now block players custom emotes… well I figured that it was a small price to pay for being able to simply block just a couple problem players, thus removing the lion’s share of public pseudo ERP from the chat window.

Most players are becoming accustomed with disappointment, and starting to almost expect bizarre changes like this, so it is not as hard to ignore the bad and focus on the good I suppose.

Guhracie.3419:

The reason is that the first instance of the name, before the colon, is interactive. You can click to block/report on it. However, my biggest complaint is people who spam non-custom emotes over and over again, and those emotes weren’t effected. No way to ignore the /dance x1000 people yet.

Exactly! The clickability is not worth it.

I really think the Devs need to go play a couple other MMO’s before making changes like this. Ensure they are at least staying on Par with how the competition is functioning.

Just giving a little niggle as I would hate so see this issue fall through the cracks

Surbrus.6942:

I too was annoyed about this most recent change, but upon hearing that we could now block players custom emotes… well I figured that it was a small price to pay for being able to simply block just a couple problem players, thus removing the lion’s share of public pseudo ERP from the chat window.

I agree that the ability to block the emotes would be helpful sometimes. However, I still do not get why they had to make the character’s name appear twice instead of just making the character’s name clickable in the emote.

I am not a role player but I think you could work around this. You could type in so that the end result reads like this :

Hystery: I am posting a thread on the forums.

(in other words forget about the “/me”)

The difference is the previous style reads like a book written in third person. This suggested style reads like a screen play happening right now.

apparently the bug for /me has been fixed
I cannot confirm this right now, but it is circulating that the bug has been fixed

Lazuli.2098:

I am not a role player but I think you could work around this. You could type in so that the end result reads like this :

Hystery: I am posting a thread on the forums.

(in other words forget about the “/me”)

The difference is the previous style reads like a book written in third person. This suggested style reads like a screen play happening right now.

No, if you do a custom emote, it includes your name twice. “/emote pats the puppy.” now yields the following: Guhracie: Guhracie pats the puppy.

Edit: Just saw this was fixed in the latest build. It’d be nice if it would apply to non-custom emotes, though.

Just tested it out, and it is indeed fixed. They do listen to us sometimes!

Guhracie.3419:

Lazuli.2098:

I am not a role player but I think you could work around this. You could type in so that the end result reads like this :

Hystery: I am posting a thread on the forums.

(in other words forget about the “/me”)

The difference is the previous style reads like a book written in third person. This suggested style reads like a screen play happening right now.

No, if you do a custom emote, it includes your name twice. “/emote pats the puppy.” now yields the following: Guhracie: Guhracie pats the puppy.

Could you leave of the “/emote” so it comes out: Guhracie: pats the puppy

I’m pretty sure in screen plays stage direction and actions are usually delimited so they can be distinguished from dialog.

Maybe something like: Guhracie: pats the puppy Nice doggie.

It could be confusing for awhile until a standard convention gets adopted but I wouldn’t count on Anet reverting.

Good luck.

Edit: Well OK. I guess they will fix things. Here’s hoping they fix traits sometime.

It’s there so people can block people doing those emotes if they want. Maybe its redundant but the first part there is a “link” that you can right click and block/report said user for doing bad harassing things.

GUYS THEY FIXED IT
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-September-9-2014/first#post4392664

IT’S OFFICIAL

Paradox.1380:

It’s there so people can block people doing those emotes if they want. Maybe its redundant but the first part there is a “link” that you can right click and block/report said user for doing bad harassing things.

It no longer exists. Check the patch update notes on the latest build.

That’s good I guess as long as I can still block people for harassing with emotes =)

Yeah I believe you still can with the /block instruction

According to the patch notes this feature has been fixed!