Guild Wars 2

Hi@all,

I’ve been a long time competetive gamer and I’ve watched countless hours of tournaments and other streams of these games; currently, I even watch tons of SC2, even though I’m not playing anymore.
But with GW2, it’s a different story: I almost never watch tournaments, because it’s just a pain to spectate. Even for a player with 5k+ competetive games, it’s confusing, cluttered and it’s hard to follow whats going on.
To be clear: I don’t think this is the observers fault or that the casters are doing a bad job explaining things, it’s just how the game looks and is built.

However, I think there are possibilities to make GW2 more accessible and easier to watch. I’ve had some Ideas and I really would like to hear your own Ideas and get your feedback on this!

Minor Changes:
- higher contrast, stronger colors and maybe bigger icons of the classes on the minimap.
- generally slightly bigger minimap.
- stronger teamcolors on the outfit of the characters itself.
- ability to toggle the class-icon in teamcolor on top of the characters: doing this for a few seconds, when jumping on a new part of the map, would help spectators to quickly get an overview of the situation.

Major Changes:
- Effects in teamcolor: this is the most confusing aspect of watching GW2: the tons and tons of effects floating around on the screen: If you jump on a place on the map where a fight is happening and there are aoe-fields and effects, you often have no clue who they belong to. There needs to be a certain intdicator which projectiles and fields at least belong to which team. You could do this by placing colored outlines on the bottom around the fields, but this would probably clutter the screen even more. Just coloring the effects in teamcolors would be pretty drastic, but IMHO also very likely the most effective way to deal with this problem.

de-cluttering the screen: (these are minor things that could improve the viewing experience dramatically when added up)
there are tons of things that clutter up the screen that really don’t have to be visible in the spectator-mode:
- Finishers: The simple stick will suffice: I just saw a game where sm1 died in a teamfight and they used this super adventure box finisher: couldn’t see anything for a few seconds… ^^’
- Backpacks: not needed and because the same can be worn by any class, it just makes it harder to identify the class.
- Effects on the legendary weapons: I mean those little puddles or rainbows or whatever they leave behind: absolutely unnecessary in observer-mode. I even think you should be able to toggle them off for pvp in general, because it’s actually minor little disadvantage to leave trail behind you. :P
- Tone down unneeded effects: there are tons of effects that don’t serve any purpose in the game that still clutter up the screen, just a few simple examples: Fire Elemental has little flames around it when it flaps it’s wings. Tons of little smoke-clouds on the ground when jumping or after certain skills. Generally too big effects on skills like grenades (especially the ice grenades).
—> If sm1 wants to take spectating seriously at ANet, they should literally look at every skill and just cut any particle effect or whatever out that doesn’t help players and spectators alike to identify which skill it was that spawned that certain visual effect.

So, what do you guys think? Do you like how GW2 looks as a spectator game, do you think my ideas would improve the experience and do you have other ideas to make GW2 a better spectator-e-sport?

bump….

I don’t think we need 10 turret-whine threads on page 1 and this constructive post descends into nothingness… -.-°

Yea they should definitely add options to disable or tone down completely unneeded effects. Like you said, weapon, backback, minion, finisher effects should all be removable. Also would like to be able to tone down effects of all the abilities that do instant damage, for example the fire sigil… you’ve already been hit, nothing can be done, the fiery explosion gives you no info.

The stuff I want to see include: Fields, channeled abilities, AoE circles, invulnerabilities used (stone signet, endure pain, distortion etc) and especially animations. In addition to improving the spectators experience, this would also affect the players… cause the animations to be more visible and enable more skilled counterplay.

The teamcolor changes you mentioned sound like a very good idea too.

Great suggestions, I personally do watch the competetive GWII games but I feel you with regards to it being quite chaotic with lots of clutter.

In that respect, if they really want to make it spectator friendly and more competetive minded, add a replay option where you can download and watch not just your own games but those of players you like and want to learn from. Dota 2 is great in this respect. You can just follow a certain player (say if I main a thief I could follow the thief in game) or the caster-cam in game.

Also, a proper spectate function for Arenas. Yes, this would introduce the risk of teams having spies spectating so they can ghost but for competetive games you could just limit this function or add a delay.

Part of the problem is that the game mode in itself isn’t spectator friendly. One thing in common in just about any spectator event is that there is room for easily identifiable amazing things to happen.

In basketball you have last-second scores, half court shots, etc. Football has amazing touchdowns and passes, intercepts.

Are there any skillshots in GW2 pvp? Any amazing moments that can be easily picked up amongst the cluster****? Really the only thing spectators can latch on to is the score and how close it gets (nobody likes seeing blowouts), and an occasional tactical maneuver like lord-rushing. Most of the time though everything just blends together.

Nice, a good and constructive post on the forums.

On-Topic: I can agree on everything you said so far: more strong identification on color to better distinction between Red Team and Blue Team. I’m fine with your takes on animations that cluster the view.

Too, I’d find amazing that some elite skills or utilities like Warbanner or Portal would get, maybe a map shout-out in spectator mode. Maybe a “Portal here!” thing, so everyone knows this crucial skills are noticed. This would cause a discussion about “which skills deserve this feature?”

As for spectator overall for Gw2, as this game can’t have huge moments or huge “plays” due to its combat system, I find it can have a good spectator mode if some changes, as yours, are done. For example, the “true beauty” of the Conquest Game Mode are rotations, that is, how the team as a whole moves through the map. I’ve seen tons of matches won by a team inferior in mechanical skill, just because of better rotations and knowledge of the map.

So, maybe, objectives can be the “big plays” of the sPvP Gw2 gameplay. Did they decide to give up this objective? What are they doing instead? Et cetera. So casters can, while casting, “theorize” more about each teams movements and such. This is why I think Stronghold will be “better” than Conquest for the viewer (and in my opinion, it will be at least the same funny to play).

This is my take on this. Thanks again for this kind of post, I love them.

As a competitive player myself, and tourney watcher, I find myself often times very confused what is happening, especially at mid.

I think a lot of it has to do with camera positioning, and whoever controls that during matches needs work. There is often times too many camera cuts as they are trying to cover caps, decaps, etc.

I do like it when they follow an actual player and the color commentary helps to build the excitement.

However, I don’t play LoL but sometimes I watch vids on it via Kotaku, and everytime I see a video from that game I can’t think how utterly slow and boring LoL looks in comparison the the frantic nature of Conquest.

They should treat the camera work like basketball, a high energy fast paced 5v5 sport that allows you to see most of the players at all time. Not saying it would be easy, but it might help.

And yes, there is WAY too many effects going on with fields, finishers, floaters, etc. Team uniforms would be nice too. I know they have default player and team colors, but that kind of makes it look uninteresting as this is a high fantasy game.

I agree with everything said here.
The problem I see is that spectator mode in Arenas is made to GW2 players who are there trying to learn more about the ones who are playing, focusing most of the time in 1 or 2 players because of their skills and/or classes. There’s no “spectator mode” build for esports competitive scene and this game needs one.
- We need Replays: showing the “best” moves, skills, combos and decisions and it would help knowing what are the “plays” of the game that need to be focused on.
- We need MORE Team Colors: making it with 4 or 5 colors (only blue and red is not enough), to distinguish teams and even making fans of each team identify themselves with the team colors.
- Chosing Characters: The thing with LoL is that each team has to carefully chose their champions while restricting the other teams on how they play. This not only gives spectators some more “unexpected things” to look for (which is what makes any sport and esport competitions be succcessfull in media) it also encourages teams and players to be more creative with their decisions and team setups.
- Better Camera: I agree with you on the minimap and I also agree with Nathaniel (post above). I made my girlfriend (not a gamer, except for Sims) learn how this game works by watching just the minimap alone, because she didn’t understand anything that was going on before and hated it. I also know the only time spectators from other games understand what’s happening is when they show the map right at the beguinning of a match. So, like Nathaniel said, we need a view of the entire teams playing from above, with better colors and saturation it would be easy to understand what’s happening everywhere, AND the close-ups could be made when the teams/action are all in one place.

EDIT: With a camera from above, replays would show the best individual skills and moments, making players understand what is really happening and what was a good or a bad decision, what a skill can/cannot do, etc.