ArenaColin 301 points 8 days ago
Thanks folks, I passed this discussion along to the folks driving the project on combat visibility.
Combat visibility in general isn’t driven by any sort of “esports” stuff though I realize that’s the easy out that’s cool thing to blame things on this week. Despite some of the insane assumptions I’ve seen lately, the PvP pro league is pretty much entirely a marketing team thing and has almost no impact on the dev team. Though we all think it’s really cool, and seriously some of those games monday were awesome!
From a marketing standpoint, it (and the ESL weekly cups and WTS tournaments before it) has been extremely successful so far, among the most successful projects our marketing team has ever launched to grow our title in the history of the Guild Wars franchise in return for the cost. If you don’t like it more power to you, don’t watch, but it’s absolutely helping our marketing folks make Gw2 a bigger game which I’d hope we’re all excited about. If you want to see the game fail I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but rooting against programs like pro league is basically rooting against Gw2 growing. When folks come here and rip on stuff like PvP, you’re basically hurting the games ability to grow – and personally I would say shame on you, if you truly love the game, be constructive and give awesome feedback and suggestions: but don’t knock it just cause it’s not PvE. And let’s be honest, it beats spending marketing funds on taxi confession ads or people spray painting wall cinematics if you ask me.
The reality about FX visibility is it’s consistent feedback we’ve had on every part of Gw2 for years that people can’t always see what’s going on in combat; our design, gameplay programming and FX team are putting a focus on resolving this issue together. This is most important in WvW and open world PvE where it’s the most problematic and where we need to solve this the most, though certainly impacts other parts of the game from Raids to Fractals to PvP.
Seeing what’s going on in combat isn’t a PvP problem – it’s a Gw2 problem, and it’s why our teams are trying to address it. I will say last time I saw the backlog of combat visibility cleanup work, the vast majority of stuff was along the lines of what you’re all suggesting below. More programming solutions at the systemic level and going after a lot of the side-FX like noise generated by other players rather than directly impacting your own FX 100% of the time. That’s the type of stuff you should be seeing in the future as this project ramps up, and looking at more options so you can opt into more noise if you want seems pretty logical. Along with that I imagine they will have opportunities to revisit some of the concerns raised here in relation to needing to see stuff that is important and how some FX have now become unreadable that should be, it’s (mostly) great constructive and totally fair feedback imho.
