Guild Wars 2

Currently, the developers try to prevent us from talking to the enemy. I assume this is meant to stop abusive messaging. However, there is a bug (which I’m sure they know about) that allows us to still do this. My experience of talking to the enemy has, thus far, been very positive. I would like for this bug to become a sanctioned option for players who WANT to talk to the enemy.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I am assuming the ban is to protect people from being flamed by the enemy. It this way, it’s like a “chat filter”. I want an option in the gameplay menu to turn this filter off so that I can opt in to receiving whispers from the enemy team. Obviously, leave the filer on by default to protect the innocent.

If the GW2 team wants to prevent chat abuse, I’d recommend this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt9GwmOWoqo

Addendum: I’m sure some people will bring up collusion as a reason to ban enemy chat. I don’t see this as a big problem; it is already possible for servers to collude through side channel traffic like third party websites or even voice communication. Furthermore, I sometimes think some collusion would be a good thing—-it would keep things interesting to see servers work together and betray each other.

Names should be visible across servers, and right click -> whisper right along side it. WvW survives on the back of grudges/communities, and disabling any form of identity or communication doesn’t help that.

I do a lot of sPvP and I only remember a single time where it got nasty. Compare that to the hundreds of times its gotten nasty in cities/pve, and I’m not seeing why we need to be kept away from each other in WvW. I’ve talked to enemies 4-5 times in WvW using whisper bugs, and its always ended up being positive.

I think anet has this weird idea that making everyone anonymous means no one can hate each other, but that’s the opposite of how interaction works. When you can talk to someone, see their character name, and get used to seeing them, it humanizes them and ultimately makes things less hostile than fighting nameless hordes.

I completely agree with Pinko.

While I understand the thought process behind not allowing names to be seen, this game thrives on the community. How can you build a community with grudges, feuds, competative fun without knowing who the enemy is? In the 20 some odd years I’ve been gaming I’ve always seen the ability to know who your enemy is to be a positive rather than a negative.

I would like to be able to say, “Oh look, it’s Snow’s group! It looks like they are gonna hit the supply camp, lets see if we can ambush them! Watch out for their mesmer Danicam, he hits hard!”

Right now we have nameless huge blobs of non-descript people running around in circles.

Sure, there are some idiots out there that will abuse people… report them, move on, watch the ban hammer fall. Easy.

Pinko.2076:

Names should be visible across servers, and right click -> whisper right along side it. WvW survives on the back of grudges/communities, and disabling any form of identity or communication doesn’t help that.

I think anet has this weird idea that making everyone anonymous means no one can hate each other, but that’s the opposite of how interaction works. When you can talk to someone, see their character name, and get used to seeing them, it humanizes them and ultimately makes things less hostile than fighting nameless hordes.

I think the devs have this weird preconception that the people doing WvW are like infants that need to be shielded from every harm possible. They therefore do whatever they can to prevent any harm from befalling their poor babies. I’m surprised they even allow guild tags and unique looks in WvW.

Like you said WvW, at least for the dedicated guilds, becomes much more interesting when it involves the social interaction between these guilds. Being able to taunt your foes after their defeats, acknowledging them for a good fight, or blaming their victory on their vastly superior numbers, is an important aspect for WvW. It helps build the competitive nature that makes people come back for more. The fact that Anet is not encouraging this more openly is a shame and shows a lack of understanding of a decent part of their games more devoted population.

Heru.5427:

Pinko.2076:

Names should be visible across servers, and right click -> whisper right along side it. WvW survives on the back of grudges/communities, and disabling any form of identity or communication doesn’t help that.

I think anet has this weird idea that making everyone anonymous means no one can hate each other, but that’s the opposite of how interaction works. When you can talk to someone, see their character name, and get used to seeing them, it humanizes them and ultimately makes things less hostile than fighting nameless hordes.

I think the devs have this weird preconception that the people doing WvW are like infants that need to be shielded from every harm possible. They therefore do whatever they can to prevent any harm from befalling their poor babies. I’m surprised they even allow guild tags and unique looks in WvW.

Like you said WvW, at least for the dedicated guilds, becomes much more interesting when it involves the social interaction between these guilds. Being able to taunt your foes after their defeats, acknowledging them for a good fight, or blaming their victory on their vastly superior numbers, is an important aspect for WvW. It helps build the competitive nature that makes people come back for more. The fact that Anet is not encouraging this more openly is a shame and shows a lack of understanding of a decent part of their games more devoted population.

I thought the general consensus was that just about everything they do with wvw shows they have little understanding of what their playerbase wants

Musty.3148:

While I understand the thought process behind not allowing names to be seen

I don’t. This is a bad idea in every single MMO it has been implemented in. It doesn’t prevent spying by anyone who has any actual desire to do so, and the only other commonly cited reason is to protect everyone’s feelings from trash talk. The loss in community and dynamic gameplay to common restriction is tragic.

EnRohbi.2187:

I thought the general consensus was that just about everything they do with wvw shows they have little understanding of what their playerbase wants

Trying to be a nice guy here… :/

Heru.5427:

EnRohbi.2187:

I thought the general consensus was that just about everything they do with wvw shows they have little understanding of what their playerbase wants

Trying to be a nice guy here… :/

I usually am, and I like Anet a lot as a developer (most times),
But they have a lot of things wrong with this game.

This is completely understandable, it’s new.
But they need to focus more on wvw (I don’t have a lot of faith that the february patch is going to be as game changing as Anet likes to say it will be), so I want to see them pushed in the right direction.

You can just talk to the enemy through the forums
I mean. Their account name is right there <—

Just whisper the name and speak to them in game.
How you build cross server alliances against a greater foe.

The people who post on the forums are a tiny percentage of the players. In all the time I’ve spent as a roamer in 1v1. I’ve met like 3 people who actually post on forums and dozens who have never posted. I like the current implementation. Party requests are great! It gives the option to decline if the person on the other server does not wish to chat.

Rob.7624:

You can just talk to the enemy through the forums
I mean. Their account name is right there <—

Just whisper the name and speak to them in game.
How you build cross server alliances against a greater foe.

It would be nice to see the nametags of people that post on the forums in game, though. It would put the egos to test. Again, WvW will survive on the community aspect of it. Who really cares about winning anymore? People just want good fights, and knowing your opponent adds to any fight you have.

I really hope Anet reads these threads and considers changing the name thing. Here’s a middle ground if they think people need to be protected from human interaction: make showing your character name/ID an optional toggle in the hero panel. I would definitely turn it on. I’ll take anything that adds more human element to WvW.

Honestly GW2 has a block option. If someone is harassing another player /block them.

Arena net should allow opposing servers to see names or at least contact one another.

Many servers have people who exploit and such and are trying to shun those people, ban them, ect…. Arena Net is slow to ban, and slow to react; while in game speaking with the enemy 2 servers could work out something, and find the exploiting player.

I don’t agree that we should be able to whisper opposing forces. Anonymity suits the format, since the goal of WvW is to attack an entire server rather than one individual. If you want to talk to a singular opponent you do have the option to invite them to your party, and it is up to that opponent whether to accept your request or deny it. I’ve been on the receiving end of nasty /whispers before the report function was fixed, and let me tell you no one should be subjected to flaming or trolling just because they win or lose a battle. Block is not the solution. The game is fine the way it is. Stop the poor behavior before it happens.

Minoru.1237:

I don’t agree that we should be able to whisper opposing forces. Anonymity suits the format, since the goal of WvW is to attack an entire server rather than one individual.

You’re making a leap here and I don’t see the connection. If we saw player names entire servers would target one guy? Why?

If you want to talk to a singular opponent you do have the option to invite them to your party, and it is up to that opponent whether to accept your request or deny it.

A reason people are requesting this is because, if history is any indication, it’s not intended and will be removed. Also only about 2% of the userbase even knows how to do this, so the amount of communication is way lower than it should be. Formally introducing a way to talk would make people aware of its existance, and making it easier would make communication way more common.

I’ve been on the receiving end of nasty /whispers before the report function was fixed, and let me tell you no one should be subjected to flaming or trolling just because they win or lose a battle. Block is not the solution. The game is fine the way it is. Stop the poor behavior before it happens.

Wow. You are saying people should be banned from talking to each other because there’s a chance that it could be rude? That’s a really weird way to think of interaction. Getting 1 out of 10 rude whispers involves hitting report if you care, and block if you don’t. If it’s really so scary to people, then just have a toggle to hide/show name in WvW.

Going to be honest, going by your post, you sound pretty paranoid about people in general.

Thanks for all the supporting posts, guys! I was actually expecting people to object, silly me.

As others already said, my concern is that the current bug that lets you talk to the opposing team will get closed in the future. I think that would be a shame as its the last available avenue for communication/identification. Does anyone have a better suggestion of how this could work than the “opt in to WvW enemy chat” toggle that I proposed? If we could flesh out a constructive suggestion in this direction, there is the (small) possibility Arenanet would listen.