Guild Wars 2

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I may be mistaken, but I read somewhere that the Romans actually used the thumbs down to signify “let him live” and thumbs up for “stab him in the heart”. Ouch. ;D

I can fix that!!

So I get your rock and hard place Devs. On one hand you need to acknowledge that visual noise can make it hard to see fight mechanic AOEs and cues. On the other hand, most of what we as players enjoy is seeing the full beauty that is this game. You solve one, you hurt the other.

I get that it may be a difficult solution, and that the coding is likely a nightmare, but please just give us a SLIDER. That way we can decide for ourselves how much “noise” we want. That way those whose computers need less processing, or those who need to see the “tells” better can slide it down, while the rest of us can still enjoy our fireworks.

It’s really the only solution. The “minimal” effects are so faint they might as well be badges, no one can see anything really anymore and so it doesn’t really feel like we are doing anything. Where is the fun in that?

Also. Viva la marionette!

Siobhan.5273:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I may be mistaken, but I read somewhere that the Romans actually used the thumbs down to signify “let him live” and thumbs up for “stab him in the heart”. Ouch. ;D

I can fix that!!

Hee hee. Thanks.

This makes zero sense. Reduced visual noise by removing cool effects from auras. Added visual noise with pointless numbers next to name (this shouldn’t show outside of PvP!!)

We need to post our discontent with what we wasted money on in popular gaming sites for them to take action and give is what we want. OUR kittenING VISUAL EFFECTS BACK.

If they care so much for marketing, they need to realise that it solely depends on us the costumers, and you know that “COSTUMERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT”,

The visual nerfs make me not want to play anymore. Which is sad because I just spent money on gems for season 2 plus other stuff.

Since the visual noise reductions have nothing to do with the Pro League, A-Net should just roll back all the visual special effects nerfs prior to the Nov 17 patch until they can implement Colin’s “programming solutions” & “options” (alluded to in his Reddit post) that would allow each player to tailor the special effects to his/her liking.

No new coding would have to be programmed because it already existed. Since 2012 GW2 players have happily coexisted with full beautiful special effects and the majority of players prefer how they were opposed to what they are now.

It is especially such a waste to see all the gorgeous special effects artwork created for the elite professions downgraded to shadows of their former glory. I was so excited about finally getting to play as a Chronomancer and casting her new artistic-looking time-bending powers only to have it stripped from me a few weeks later. Honestly, I haven’t been able to log in since the last patch because I am so disappointed.

Not so long ago Colin posted the following:

Colin Johanson on Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead

As we push the boundaries and do new things with what an online game can be, we’ll likely hit some bumps along the road on the way. With your feedback and support, we’ll learn from those mistakes, grow from them, and be as transparent about them as possible. We’ll also have some amazing moments, and hopefully craft gaming memories you and we will never forget. And though you may not always know it, we’ll be right there in-game playing next to you as well.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

Does ArenaNet still believe in player feedback & support, learning from mistakes, and being transparent? It’s hard to tell when major game changes are made without a chance for feedback & Developers are no longer available for response; but, I really hope so since so many of us have so much time & money invested into Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, please give a response to the official thread in the OFFICIAL FORUMS on where you stand with this.

Most of us are very unhappy with how these visual noise changes were implemented.

Roll them back. In the meantime, figure out a slider or option to turn on and off.

Thanks.

wetwillyhip.7254:

Roll them back. In the meantime, figure out a slider or option to turn on and off.

this

please

nicknamenick.2437:

Khezekiah Bellamy.5016:

New aura animations are TERRIBLE! do you expect me to watch my enemies buff bar the entire time i am fighting them in pvp to notice when they have an aura, we NEED to be able to see when someone has an aura, not be fighting them and suddenly be stunned and have to look at all their 30 buffs to find out if it was shocking aura that we couldn’t see, or why my projectiles are being reflected, or why I am being burned, or chilled when I hit people. BRING BACK OLD AURAS or make it where we can choose what skills are visually nerfed with a new graphics option tab

good pvp players dont watch only the animation but also the buff bar.

Warrior endure pain also have a small visual thing, did you ever saw that? NO
What have you learn against warriors? check there buff bar.

Why should it be any difference for ele aura’s.

I get why you people like the visual stuff, but the fact is that there is too much of this going on, too much means you cant even READ anymore whats going on because its not just you but allot more stacking on the small node, wich blocks ALLOT of animations wich you should read but cant because of your fireball auto spam or other visual noise.

Warrior dont have ANY big visual stuff while in stance mode yet Nobody ever had hard time against it because you know how to read it.. you get used to it.

Uh… now could you please explain what you said?

If you mean that status bars should be the only things we see, well… you could play Angband instead of Guild Wars 2, I guess.

People here aren’t complaining about effects that haven’t been added to the game yet – the issue is the amazing effects many people loved that have been removed. And the fact that it could easily be an in-game option as to whether or not the effect displays, because it is a simple GPU option and does not affect gameplay (as evidenced by your example of status bars).

It boggles my mind that they didn’t just add visual fx options like every other frigging mmo on the planet. The new auras are nearly invisible and put some animation around characters’ feet. OK. Except with all the other effects going on, including ground targeted skills and ground effects you cannot see that either (and lol@giving any revenant with fragments auras and being able to tell). You know what I COULD see (and HEAR) the old auras, so I knew that hitting someone would result in something negative.

Anet, please – just put in an option for high, medium and low fight fx. It would be appreciated a lot.

Astra Lux.2846:

It boggles my mind that they didn’t just add visual fx options like every other frigging mmo on the planet. The new auras are nearly invisible and put some animation around characters’ feet. OK. Except with all the other effects going on, including ground targeted skills and ground effects you cannot see that either (and lol@giving any revenant with fragments auras and being able to tell). You know what I COULD see (and HEAR) the old auras, so I knew that hitting someone would result in something negative.

Yup – and there’s also no need to take away the old in this situation. That’s the most astonishing thing about many of the latest updates. A lot of things we already had (and a lot of people were happy with) have been removed/replaced rather than expanded upon or made optional.

I am just disappointed what happened to my Elementalist.
If you want to change something, this would be ok:

Option: Show/Hide all player effects

Please give us back the effects.

It’s a bit alarming to have these people be in charge of the game and blatantly lie to customers. How do they even get into that position while being so out of touch, while at the same time displaying extremely unprofessional behavior?

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

It seems from what Collin said that they intended to add some option controls, if I read it correctly. So it’s odd that they didn’t start from that end, especially since doing it the other way may involve some rework (based on my own experience with something similar in my own work).

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

Too bad these nerfs did nothing for bosses because impact particles are completely unchanged and still scale with mob size.

Daralii.8940:

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

Too bad these nerfs did nothing for bosses because impact particles are completely unchanged and still scale with mob size.

Hahaha that’s actually a pretty funny pickup. I haven’t been on since yesterday’s update to test that. xD

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

Can you not press the tab key to cycle thru your targets, or left-click directly on the world boss to lock onto target? It is really necessary to see your individual attacks land on a boss when you already know which attacks you are executing? Seriously, dude?!

I’m just waiting for them to nerf weapon sizes on norns because they’re too big on someone’s screen. That’ll be hilarious, hah. Massive guardians with toothpick greatswords. It’ll be like bobble-head days.

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

These “nerfs” haven’t done jack kitten in reducing the so called “visual noise” (I am so sick of that term). Impact particles that scale up are what prevents one from seeing mobs and bosses, and those haven’t been touched. And tell me, how much clutter did the old version of auras cause?
Nothing has been improved for anyone with these nerfs.

The Greyhawk.9107:

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

These “nerfs” haven’t done jack kitten in reducing the so called “visual noise” (I am so sick of that term). Impact particles that scale up are what prevents one from seeing mobs and bosses, and those haven’t been touched. And tell me, how much clutter did the old version of auras cause?
Nothing has been improved for anyone with these nerfs.

(Maybe some people were complaining about four-second bubbles? O.o)

The Greyhawk.9107:

Fernling.1729:

Visual effect nerfs is something myself and many other players have been asking for since the game’s release. I stick by wanting the effects lessened. I do think a slider would be make things just peachy.

If I had to choose between nerfs or no nerfs without a slider, I would choose the nerfs. World bosses(and sometimes even 5 man bosses) just had too many effects to see the tell of certain attacks.

These “nerfs” haven’t done jack kitten in reducing the so called “visual noise” (I am so sick of that term). Impact particles that scale up are what prevents one from seeing mobs and bosses, and those haven’t been touched. And tell me, how much clutter did the old version of auras cause?
Nothing has been improved for anyone with these nerfs.

I actually haven’t played enough lately to know if the changes helped out or not. I am just assuming they did. I simply saw that they toned down some effects and thought that was great and hopefully it made a difference. If they are toning down things that aren’t the problem, then that’s a problem in itself.

Probably should understand what everyone is talking about before I chime in.

I just logged in and saw my mesmer’s chaos armor. What are you thinking ANET?! This looks absolutely ridiculous. In what possible way does this help with being able to see things in battle? Most you should’ve done is lower the purple contrast a bit not make it look like some silly near invisible egg. Please have some common sense and make changes that are sensible and not just downright lazy. I heard Colin’s response but he doesn’t seem to realize that people aren’t changing their mind about wanting less visual noise, they just wanted visuals modified so that they wouldn’t interfere in fights. No one asked for an absolute gutting of the graphical appeal of the game. My mind is absolutely blown right now how they can continue to do this. None of the changes that were made that I’ve seen addressed the ACTUAL problem areas. Not to mention gutting it this much actually makes things worse because you still want to be able to SEE these skills.

Also not sure why people are asking for a complex slider. A simple on/off toggle would do until ANET frees up some resources so that they can put some actual effort into these things. I was planning on buying HoT around christmas but as silly as it sounds I’m pretty put off by this and might wait till I see how things go in the future.

speaking of auras. with the new egg shape my mesmer actually stands halfway outside the aura when wielding a staff. gg anet

Blessed.2198:

Seabreeze.8437:

Colin’s post definitely implied that he was frustrated with some of the player base. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but maybe now he knows how we feel.

I don’t give a kitten if he’s frustrated with some players or not. They ruined a part of the game that I and many others enjoyed, now it’s up to them to fix it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to excuse the patronizing tone of his post at all. I’m just as frustrated with these recent decisions as anyone here, but this is what happens when things are changed with ZERO communication whatsoever. This is why games like Heroes of the Storm have a public test realm (PTR) to test proposed patches and gather preliminary feedback before they roll it out live. Instead what Anet has been doing is throwing out patches that drastically effect player experience and then end up being surprised when they receive less than favorable feedback.

Please people stop pushing for shrinking effects on bosses. I don’t understand why so many people have an issue with these effects, it’s been like this for 3 years and we’ve all killed world bosses and are clearing raids- there is nothing to fix here. I really, really, like the scaling of effects on bosses as a guardian, I’m engulfing this creature in righteous fire and it is freaking beautiful.

Also keep in mind there’s 80 or so players sitting there blasting at a boss using magic- it should look like a firework show that’s a lot of power! For people with garbage computers let them turn off these effects, but let me keep mine.

Astra Lux.2846:

speaking of auras. with the new egg shape my mesmer actually stands halfway outside the aura when wielding a staff. gg anet

One of my favourite visual effects which is a chaos shield is now a freaking egg. Don’t wanna play mesmer with the staff anymore.

For god’s sake, is it hard to make visual effects nerfs to be an option if Anet wants it so badly? Like a switch or something. So that other people can play with normal visual effects if they want to

Surian.3946:

Please people stop pushing for shrinking effects on bosses. I don’t understand why so many people have an issue with these effects, it’s been like this for 3 years and we’ve all killed world bosses and are clearing raids- there is nothing to fix here. I really, really, like the scaling of effects on bosses as a guardian, I’m engulfing this creature in righteous fire and it is freaking beautiful.

Also keep in mind there’s 80 or so players sitting there blasting at a boss using magic- it should look like a firework show that’s a lot of power! For people with garbage computers let them turn off these effects, but let me keep mine.

If something truly needs to be fixed it is the scaling of these effects because they are the primary reason why people have trouble discerning what is going on. It also doesn’t really make sense immersion-wise for a blast to get bigger on large enemies. My fireballs should have the same blast every time. Why would the blast suddenly grow if my fireball was the same size to the one that I fired on a smaller enemy?

However, Anet could make options for the blast effects too. After all, options is what many people are asking for, and we shouldn’t forget that when shifting the blame for visual clutter to other sources.

Can’t optimize well so they remove the cool effects. “People hate cool looking games….” Said no one ever.

500+ posts and no official response? They just don’t seem to care what we think.

Jax.4903:

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of GW2 players’ voices suddenly cried out in Nerf Terror and were suddenly silenced by A-Net.

I am venturing to guess that Arena Net management has recently changed because GW2 has lost its original spirit, philosophy, and direction that used to be focused on providing players with a very rewarding, interactive world that was extremely fun & without the endless grind feeling typical of many MMORPGS. More importantly, we used to have a voice that the Developers heard and responded to when it came to Guild Wars 2 evolution.

Now it’s nerf map events with Diminishing Returns (using bots as an excuse), nerf salvaging to make crafting harder, nerf dungeon rewards because A-Net doesn’t want players doing them anymore, nerf all professions beloved special effects because of “visual noise” that no one has ever complained about… and if you don’t like it as a player, too bad it’s our game; you no longer have a voice.

As I said before, I dealt with getting less rewards for doing PvP, WvW, Dungeons, & Fractals, but when A-Net stripped my heroes of all their visual appeal, what do I have left? What purpose if left for me to keep playing all my level 80 heroes if I no longer enjoy the graphics which were a big part of my fun? It certainly isn’t for me to get 1-2 exotic drops a day or an ascended chest every 2-3 months or maybe a legendary weapon after a year of grinding.

Colin Johanson on Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead
by Colin Johanson on January 15, 2013

To make playing in our open world worthwhile, we’ll make it rewarding enough for players to spend their time there across all levels. It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.

As we push the boundaries and do new things with what an online game can be, we’ll likely hit some bumps along the road on the way. With your feedback and support, we’ll learn from those mistakes, grow from them, and be as transparent about them as possible. We’ll also have some amazing moments, and hopefully craft gaming memories you and we will never forget. And though you may not always know it, we’ll be right there in-game playing next to you as well.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

^This.

GW2 now is a GRIND fest/gold(& mats) sink.
Everything is nerfed now, I need to keep farming and farming to get maybe something.
Now dungeons are nerfed… you are best to go to the PvP to get tokens for the legendaries instead of the dungeons! it is a shame!

And now with this visual noise reduction, the game is really lame… I can’t even enjoy doing NOTHING cause it looks like a mess. My tempest can’t be happy walking around the world, his skills looks like kitten now :P

I think that the person in charge of this “reduction in visual noise” project targeted the easy objectives first, just to try and get some changes out the door fast. They should have known(and probably did know) that this would blow up in their faces. But they were probably under pressure to make some “immediate change”.
This makes it important that we keep reminding them that the changes that have been made so far generally are not doing the job, and are also not desirable. They need to realize that we need a better solution in place.
Besides, all the large World Bosses have huge, obvious tells.(Inquest Golem raising his fist, w/ orange AoE circles, Shatterer raising his paw/claw, etc…) Which are not obscured by “visual noise”. I find that the smaller World Bosses(like Svanir Shaman for instance) are more obscured by pet names and minion labels, which can’t be turned off like player names.(Geez, if I had player names on, the smaller World Bosses would be completely obscured by text.)

Sassy.1697:

“The reality about FX visibility is it’s consistent feedback we’ve had on every part of Gw2 for years that people can’t always see what’s going on in combat; our design, gameplay programming and FX team are putting a focus on resolving this issue together. This is most important in WvW and open world PvE where it’s the most problematic and where we need to solve this the most, though certainly impacts other parts of the game from Raids to Fractals to PvP.”

Sometimes I wonder…let’s not end this sentence.

Yes we did complain about FX for the past 3 years but about what FX did we complain exactly?

Certainly not:

- good looking idle animations
- visually appealing fireballs and skills that feel how they are called
- skills we can see and differentiate from one another

What we always screamed for was a FX fix for BIG bosses where certain effects scale into oblivion and clutter the whole screen (eg. Dwayna).

Also the huge FPS drops for FireFX, StormFX and other fps dumps could be tackled instead (eg. Maw).

Yet you remove visible auras that clutter little to nothing and instead go towards a GW1 approach where we had to look at status bars the whole time because we otherwise didn’t see what was going on. I always thought this was something you wanted to avoid in GW2.

You really want to tell me that invisible egg shells around players do anything at all..?

Do not twist feedback from your playerbase around just to justify your actions. Yes we asked for changed but definitly not these kind of changes.

Why not go the extra mile and show this kind of stuff before implementing it?
Why not go the extra mile and put this in as a choice?

It’s not just A-Net that loves this game – we do too – that’s why we care so much.
Always keep that in mind when people go overboard.

Sincerely,

Someone that misses the open dialogs with you guys in random arena, temple and all the other froggy times.

Extremely well said, Sassy. Well said.

Revenants in WvW doing 17k Coalescence of Ruin 1-shotting every light class and Anet meanwhile is nerfing auras visual effects. Like seriously it seems someone at Anet is reading the priority list upside down.

109 people from my guild have literally quit the game because of these effect changes.

Arena Net are you insane!? revert these changes until you can implement a slider for them! you are destroying my guild!! :c

Jesseii wrote: “109 people from my guild have literally quit the game because of these effect changes.”

110 :P. Lol kidding, I’m not in your guild, but I too quit this game!

“revert these changes until you can implement a slider for them!”

I agree 100% that they should revert this changes until they can come up with a slider or box option for visual effects :K. Seriously, I wonder how many players they are losing now cause of this visual nerfs that when they didn’t applied them in the first place :/.

I’m sorry to say this but you guys are not gonna see another monetary contribution from me until this [Filtered] is fixed/reverted/resolved. Egg auras, fire tennis balls? This isn’t why fell in love with my elementalist in the first place, so sorry.

No response after such a long thread?!

This isn’t even close to ‘a long thread’ yet. I can cheerfully point you to 50 or 60+ page threads they’ve cheerfully ignored.

If anything the length tells you they’re not interested. They react MUCH sooner to things that concern them.

What Anet doesn’t seem to realize is that some things are sacred in a game like this. When players create a character and put time and money into making that character be what they want, you don’t just pull the rug out from under them. People have invested of themselves and their resources on the trust that Anet will be respectful of that investment and not just rip things away. Yeah, I get the idea that it’s their game servers and all that. But I’m just saying that there is a certain level of trust that gets destroyed each time they do something like this. The visual effects for the spells that your character has are part of the character’s “appearance” and when you start destroying those things 3 years into a game after people have invested to have a character that they really like, it’s a real slap in the face and makes us question whether anything is sacred.

I’ll just say that the last game I quit, it was due to across-the-board, drastic changes in the character’s appearances. All of a sudden the developers thought it would be a good idea to make “improvements” and they took away the character that I had put years into building up and getting just the way I wanted. I’ll spend money on appearance items and whatnot because that’s important to me. But when you butcher the trust that I place in your company to respect that, it damages that relationship and I’ll take my money elsewhere. I don’t want to do that here because this is truly an awesome game, and a big part of the awesomeness is the artwork (characters, landscape, effects, etc.) Just keep giving us more cool zones, content, armor, etc. and I’m happy.

But please, please get a clue and don’t mess with people’s characters, of which spell effect visuals are a BIG part. They’re what makes the character “feel” powerful and magical. With this silly flaming pea shooter, I feel like my character has been neutered, and it’s downright embarrassing and depressing.

The problem is that they’re not focusing on the culprit/root of the problem: the effect splash scaling. It’s not the flight of skills that obscures view, it’s the final splash effect of the skill hitting the enemy that does. The problem is that this impact splash scales in size with the target, which is silly. I mean, just look at the size of the birds from the Ranger’s warhorn #4 skill…

This is all a result of inferior decision making and a total lack of communication between devs and the playerbase. This issue is a microcosm of the entire HoT release.

Willowfalls.9814:

What Anet doesn’t seem to realize is that some things are sacred in a game like this. When players create a character and put time and money into making that character be what they want, you don’t just pull the rug out from under them….

But please, please get a clue and don’t mess with people’s characters, of which spell effect visuals are a BIG part. They’re what makes the character “feel” powerful and magical. With this silly flaming pea shooter, I feel like my character has been neutered, and it’s downright embarrassing and depressing.

Quoted for truth! This is exactly how I feel. I really don’t have a good feeling about the direction ArenaNet is taking and more troubling is their lack of any response. It makes me wonder if they care at all about their loyal customers and if we are just seen as expendable players who can be made up for with the new free-to-play numbers.

I have been playing MMORPGs since Ultima Online and have seen the rise & fall of them all, including City of Heroes, and it is sadly feeling like the beginning of the end for Guild Wars 2. I really hope ArenaNet proves my feelings wrong by rolling back all the visual nerfs prior to the Nov 17th patch and later releases an effects slider that will allow players to choose full or partial special effects.

I really don’t think it is too much to ask that we keep the effects graphics that have been in this game since it launched in August of 2012 as well as the newer elite professions artwork that made many of us pre-order Heart of Thorns the minute it became available.

At the very least, ArenaNet, give your players the dignity of a straight YES or NO answer if you are definitely soon going to restore our full special effects with graphics options or you have no plans to do. Some of us have spent a small fortune supporting GW2 with gem store purchases and multiple accounts. I really love this game and would hate to leave, but I cannot play it as is with castrated graphics.

The auras were never clutter, neither was fireball. They just screwed up their artisticly well done game and made it look like their developers threw together crap looking auras and a pathetic one pixel animation for fireball. Nice “improvements” anet.

I just noticed that the confusion condition aura/indicator has tiny, detailed bats and butterflies flying around in it. The confusion aura is easily visible and distinctive without this “visual clutter”. It doesn’t need multiple animated figures flitting around in it to be recognizable. I don’t really care what the confusion aura looks like, so long as it’s distinctive. Why didn’t Anet start with stuff like that?
Meanwhile the buff auras are now difficult to even see, much less tell apart.

Nike.2631:

Jesseii.2097:

109 people from my guild have literally quit the game because of these effect changes.

Or it could just be that I don’t believe you.

oh

I want the special effects to be restored!
Give us an option if we want to tone it down but don’t get rid of it forcefully.

I would really want a straight answer from ArenaNet regarding this.
I put my heart and soul into this game and bought gems, please I deserve to know what’s going on with the game I grew to love all these years.

You know, I still don’t get what is going through Anet’s heads. If we (or at least most of us) could figure out that its not the size of the projectile but the splash particles that causes this so called “visual noise”, why couldn’t Arenanet? I don’t get how they can look at things like the auras as being in need of “adjustment” when they don’t contribute to at all to visual clutter. Why does any of these seem like a good idea to anyone?

The Greyhawk.9107:

You know, I still don’t get what is going through Anet’s heads. If we (or at least most of us) could figure out that its not the size of the projectile but the splash particles that causes this so called “visual noise”, why couldn’t Arenanet? I don’t get how they can look at things like the auras as being in need of “adjustment” when they don’t contribute to at all to visual clutter. Why does any of these seem like a good idea to anyone?

Because the changes were specifically targeted at gameplay where that doesn’t come into play. It’s purely for esports; Colin said as much in a blog post earlier this year.