I use the SAB Cloud glider and SAB weapon skins since last SAB festival. I remember wanting it like mad as I love any SAB themed stuff with it’s silly humor and bright immature graphics, as it positively makes me remember the games of that time.
But with that said, SAB stuff origins from a world which does not fit into Tyria – you’ve separated it into an “adventure box” on purpose. From the last things I heard, Tyria rather tries to be a realistic looking world, delivering a thrilling story about magic, dragons, (infamous) gods, alchemies, warbands, lessons in racial and cultural differencies, all in a lore spanning thousands of years with it’s own®evolutions, even covered by 3 serious novels so far.
It totally fails this the moment someone opens needlessly oversized raven gliders with their supersaturated colors and effect – or the cloud glider with it’s incredibly loud Game Boy like fanfare.
It makes you realize it’s just another game trying to provide something of everything for whatever anyone likes to generate cash, and mashes it together in a now seemingly fake virtual environment disobeying any rules of previously mentioned evolution.
And I’m only mentioning 2 gliders here.
Of course there have been errors in said evolution in the past (simple example being that nobody in their right mind would make the number 1 a / and the 2 a // in a writing system where he needs to express combinations of 1’s and 2’s later on). But those were marginal or could be fixed by “thinking about it a different way”.
For the raven or cloud glider, there’s no “different way”. They look out of place at all times.
“Moto created a portable holographic emitter creating a solid cloud allowing you to glide with no physical but probably magineural explanation, attaching speakers or bending air around it to create a fanfare” Please, that just sounds like overjustifying techno-babble known from bad Star Trek episodes when Janeway turned into a drake-like thing and made babies with her officer.
“The raven glider is some Norn ritual creating such flowerfancycolorpower around them like no other ritual ever caused – epilepticants should probably close their eyes while doing so” also just sounds like a quick way to annoy people with.
What can be done, the damage already happened, Tyria looks like a kindergarden at times now where everyone tries to be the loudest and literally “brightest” kid on the grounds. I even observed same players continually camping near a TP/Bank/Merchant apparently annoying everyone on purpose with loud bee effects and huge auras, not even actively using the game and not replying to any messages written to them.
You cannot tell players to stop using what they love, but you can allow annoyed players to believe they stopped.
Practically said, a game option to not only “mute” other player’s projectile SFX, but armor SFX or any lighting / transparency GFX – simply keeping the bare armor looks and custom dyes with default sounds, which honestly still give enough chance to “get attention” from others.
For the gliders, another option would force the default glider on everyone at all times, as gliders sadly cannot be “toned down”.
Creating a category for “serious” or “less childish” armor or effects to filter those out would probably not be a good idea as the next thread will be about “why is X muted, it’s fine in my opinion and I want others to see what I love”. If the filter applies on what everyone understands as “light / transparency effects”, everyone would know what falls into it, and you could still tell them “it’s a performance optimization for older PCs” for justification purposes :P
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