Not having the most powerful PC around (although I do intend to get a better one soon), I and I suppose many others have experienced the extremely frustrating delays in making large enemy crowds visible before it’s too late. (I think it’s termed “culling”, i.e. the game’s client/server software/hardware’s incapacity to quickly draw a large number of fast moving players at a far enough distance).
I don’t want to blame neither the software nor the hardware of neither the servers nor the player PCs. The last update did slightly improve things for me: instead of seeing the hoard after I’m dead, I now see them about 1 sec before impact. But I do think there is a very easy and quick solution to this problem.
What we need to see from a far enough distance is really not a full rendering of enemies, but just their names in red. Text is a lot faster to draw. That will be sufficient to see how many and how far, and is a lot lesser of a load than rendering whole characters in 3D. However, we need to be able to see those red names from a greater distance than they currently show.
Today you can see a mob/character from far away, but their names only appear when they come a lot closer. How about doing it the other way around? Show us the red names at a distance of minimum 8000-10000 units, and let the rest of the character render at whatever speed the hardware can manage. That is not too big a distance since you can see trees/buildings/trebuchets that are at least that far away. Whatever the distance decided upon, it has to be reasonably large to give time to react, and realistic in terms of range of sight. After all, 10000 units can be crossed in about 10 secs with speed boosts. If you can see a zerg rushing in at you, you can at least decide whether you want to continue on a collision course or do something else.
Here is an additional request:
To make it clear who is fighting whom, the 2 enemy teams need to have names in different colors. I suggest the following:
- Our team: green
- Enemy1: red
- Enemy2: violet (sufficiently different from Enemy1)
Right now all you see is red-red-red-red. How many of each team are there, approximately? Are we being attacked by both enemies at the same time? Different enemy name colors will make it a lot clearer than having to actually read all those names one by one.
Corollary:
Team/Map/Icon/Tier Rank colors can also be changed to correspond to the above:
- Our team: always the green one (green camp/fort/… icons, green name text)
- Enemy1: red
- Enemy2: violet
I think the above changes make sense and will solve the culling problem while the clever brains at Anet look for a better solution to full character rendering of large groups at far enough distances.
Finally, I have a last request. Currently, we are shown a crossed-sword icon on the map when a battle or skirmish is taking place. However, there are 2 problems with that icon:
- It does not tell me who is fighting whom
- It does not refresh fast enough (only once every 10 sec AFAIK)
If we’re not supposed to know who is fighting whom from a large distance, then the crossed-sword icon should not be displayed at all unless one of our team is close enough to observe the battle. Since it has been deemed necessary to display it, then why not make it more useful? Drawing crossed swords of different colors can tell us who is fighting whom (red+violet swords or red+green, violet+green, red+violet+green). And updating the icon more frequently (once every second or two) will make the information a lot more useful. What harm can come from us all having more useful information?
Thank you for your attention.