Guild Wars 2

Hey so I pretty much no lifed gw2 last year but eventually took a year long break where I played a lot of Smite and later Heroes of the Storm. I follow Smite and LoL’s pro scene and love watching their games. I’ve also been enjoying the gw2 pro league the last two weeks. Yet I feel there are some major and some less major improvements that the game really needs for the spectator experience to be far better than it currently is.

Spectator UI
This is the most glaring issue and honestly some of it should be easy to fix. I’m not a game dev but I cannot imagine this being difficult to change and regardless it is worth that effort. With the spectator UI you see the names and health bars of the red team listed on the left, and the names and health bars of blue on the right. Yet when you look at the minimap it is entirely the reverse, with blue base being on the left and red base being on the right. This can make it very confusing and difficult to follow the rotations and action because the two aspects don’t line up. It really doesn’t matter whether you fix the minimap (and thus map) or fix the side that names appear on but it is pretty crucial to fix. I would imagine swapping the sides for the names would be easier.

BARS! Trust me it’d be awesome! No not the drinks but bars for showing damage output / damage received / healing done that you can display midgame so we can get a better understanding of who is doing exactly what. The visuals of abilities can be a bit messy so a clean UI that can display important values like this would allow the casters to show substantive information on how the game is progressing.

I’m pretty sure (been awhile since I’ve messed around with spectator UI) but there isn’t a free cam which albeit is difficult to use if you had a dedicated camera “operator” with a free cam capability you might be able to provide a better viewing experience for spectators.

Replays
This would require a deal of work and I get that, but having replays available where players could load up (ingame) and view a replay of the pro league matches from whatever perspective they want could be a major addition and would facilitate another idea for how to improve the experience of viewers. But no matter what it would help players examine and understand pro level play.

What was the other major addition? This year for Worlds LoL had several team fight breakdown videos. This was made possible by the ability to review the games after the fact from whatever angle people wanted. A lot of complaints I hear is that Gw2 is just too messy to watch with no clue of what is going on. I felt a lot like that when I was watching LoL the first time. I think if you guys did a slow motion replay of key teamfights where you carefully highlight as many key ability casts as possible could give viewers a better understanding of what happened as well as what to look for in the future.

I’ll probably come up with more ideas and post them as I do and who knows if you’ll use any of them or not haha. But I wanted to just put up my ideas of how you can improve the game for an esports audience and at least the first one should be fairly easy to resolve.

Turn off the kittening damage numbers, no spectator gives a kitten. Or having evaded appear a billion kittening times. kitten. Read a kittening book on game design

Yeah that’s a great point too. I think they should have bars / charts to show the total damage outputted but spectators don’t need the screen clogged with all that individual damage and evades etc, rather than provide spectators with more information it just makes viewing a mess and even harder to recognize abilities.

Its just not a spectator game. It lacks the strategic depth and explosiveness of a true esport.

It lacks kittening explosiveness because the action is kittening non stop.

LegallyBinding.4937:

Its just not a spectator game. It lacks the strategic depth and explosiveness of a true esport.

I think it has plenty of strategic depth it just comes across poorly to spectators.

Yeh, there is no reason to say hey just no point to it. The spectator experience can be a lot better with even just a few small tweaks to it.

Well its been awhile but another thing that comes to mind is most esports games (such as LoL and Smite) have seperate youtube channels for their esports scene and they list each match by itself on there, so you can right away start watching, say, Abjured vs Team PZ game 2 rather than having to fast forward through videos trying to find the spot you want.

Even if you just post them to the regular youtube channel would be fine, but it would definitely be better if you could find each match individually later rather than simply scrolling through the whole stream feed trying to find it.

I mostly want the option to watch them in client so I can control who I watch. I’d also like the option to have spectate work for ranked matches, sorted by rank, like in gw1 or dota/LoL/ect.. . I don’t care about spectating hotjoin matches, in fact that’s the thing I’d want to watch the least of. This would probably be hard so I don’t imagine it being implemented soon, but I’d like it implemented

This is also a very good point and would be quite easy to do.

Shepherd.5839:

Well its been awhile but another thing that comes to mind is most esports games (such as LoL and Smite) have seperate youtube channels for their esports scene and they list each match by itself on there, so you can right away start watching, say, Abjured vs Team PZ game 2 rather than having to fast forward through videos trying to find the spot you want.

Even if you just post them to the regular youtube channel would be fine, but it would definitely be better if you could find each match individually later rather than simply scrolling through the whole stream feed trying to find it.

when I watch LoL the only thing “exploding” is my brain cells and my desire to stay awake

It’s hard to follow video replays of ESL, even when Helseth is analysing what is happening in a fight. The video is at the mercy of the “camera man” or whoever is randomly clicking the maps. Sometimes when there is a good fight, the camera focuses in a couple of seconds before moving to another fight. Maybe focus on critical fights instead. No need to view every fight on the map. It’s just moving around too much. I know we want to view the whole fight, maybe try another camera angle, similar to DotA 2 and League of Legends, that is an overhead map camera view. If not, maybe enlarge the minimap so we can all see where the players are currently on the map.

What about those times they stream for about 20 minutes on mute? Sometimes the GW2 stream is so far from professional that you give up trying to give helpful suggestions and sit back in amusement and laugh at them throw $400,000 away and think they’ll make an “Esport” out of their unbalanced bunker meta game where you have to buy the HoT expac to even be remotely competitive.

Well yeh, being able to spectate in client is something I mentioned to, it would be a great idea. Some people just want to watch the crucial fights and some people want to watch the people playing the same role as yourself, so you can figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

I would love a Observer Mode like in GW1, but the whole tournament is a marketing stunt to get people to play Guild Wars 2. I don’t see ANet planning any big developement additions to Pro PvP. One can only hope!

@shepherd I agree whole hearted with your suggestions and I hope this thread is view by the staff. I have watched many of the esl and go4 cups. Your ideas would definitely improve the viewing experience. I have a lot of PvP experience and sometimes it’s hard for me to tell what’s going on. Great constructive post. I hope that at least some of your ideas get implemented.

@RusShiro thanks! Some other people have given some great ideas too, and some of them wouldn’t be too hard to change either. Gw2’s ‘esports’ has developed a lot slower than some other big titles but I’d love to see them start taking some more steps in the right direction. Pro leagues still far better than the ToLs were haha.