Effects, Clutter, Text, Audio and Headaches

"When she lifts her hand you have to dodge""How am I supposed to see her lift her hand!?"

From 2017:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/post/quote/18252/Comment_294590

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:We are aware of this concern, and I believe you will see it addressed soon.

I'm a returning player trying to work their way up to learning the game and contribute on raids, trains, fractals and other areas and am getting frequent headaches from trying to sort through the critical boss-action warnings from the visual clutter from how flashy the effects are, how much text is on the screen, how much clutter everyone's armor has.

Plus, this only covers visual clutter. The audio clutter is just as bad, it's so much that in fights I just hear static as soon as the mob spawns until it's dead. I tried to hear audio cues here and there and I may as well just turn the sound off and listen to music.

I think what I really want is:

1. Ability to hide player names in my squad
2. Ability to hide player titles and guilds
3. Better options for reducing the screen effects.
4. Ability to reduce audio effects
5. Ability to hide other player's armor/weapon effects
6. Delete people who use the pony bow from the server.

@"Tuco.2419" said:"When she lifts her hand you have to dodge""How am I supposed to see her lift her hand!?"

From 2017:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/post/quote/18252/Comment_294590

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:We are aware of this concern, and I believe you will see it addressed soon.

1. Ability to hide player names in my squad
2. Ability to hide player titles and guilds
3. Better options for reducing the screen effects.
4. Ability to reduce audio effects
5. Ability to hide other player's armor/weapon effects
6. Delete people who use the pony bow from the server.

A few of the things you are asking for have been done, I think. For instance, you can change how and when player, enemy, and NPC names/bars appear now. I leave player names off unless I hold alt. It makes the game much cooler without name tags over everyone. When I want to see name tags I can just hold alt or hover mouse over a player.

Audio effects of other players can be turned off also for weapons, and such.

That said, I agree visual clutter and spam is WAY out of hand. I constantly lose sight of my mouse cursor in this type is content which leads to targeting and skill use issues. I wish I could see. Frankly, I had good eyesight 8 years ago. Now I need glasses, so Thanks Guild Wars 2.

Visual clutter is out of hand. We also need to be able to disable backpieces. The fact that encountering one and only one popular back piece drops my frames by 20+ is unacceptable. We really need a way to control this. Because of those wings, I would disable all other back-pieces in a heartbeat.

@Josiah.2967 said:Visual clutter is out of hand. We also need to be able to disable backpieces. The fact that encountering one and only one popular back piece drops my frames by 20+ is unacceptable. We really need a way to control this. Because if those wings, I would disable all other back-pieces in a heartbeat.

If you disable back piece that lowers the chances of ANet picking up potential new gamblers .. err I mean customers who want to purchase them.

So I would try a few things. If you have Nvidia you can use the screen overlay to adjust visual settings(or reShade I guess works too). I suggest turning Highlights down, turn bloom effect off. Turn Shadows up a little, turn contrast up and lower brightness some, then tweak till it all looks right with hopefully less intense highlights and still good contrast so you can read and have the game look pretty. That helps me allot. That said, I still would love a way to limit the how many effects or the intensity of effects of skills, infusions, and armor visual effects.

I enjoy all the visuals too. Don't get me wrong. I love all the cool looking stuff in gw2. However, some times it makes my eyes hurt and its so bright I cannot really use the interface because looking directly at it becomes painful on the eyes. Its like staring into a lightbulb some times.

I shouldn't be forced to make dramatic changes to my video settings which would detract from other aspects of the game. I agree that there ought to be an option to disable other players' effects which would not lessen the video quality of the environment for enjoyment.

@kharmin.7683 said:I shouldn't be forced to make dramatic changes to my video settings which would detract from other aspects of the game. I agree that there ought to be an option to disable other players' effects which would not lessen the video quality of the environment for enjoyment.

Agreed. And what happens with new version of GW or NVidia? Gotta keep tweaking things? I try to avoid such things.

Did a boss last night for the daily in Elon Riverlands. I only hoped I was placing my AoE's on it, really had no idea much of the time.

@kharmin.7683 said:I shouldn't be forced to make dramatic changes to my video settings which would detract from other aspects of the game. I agree that there ought to be an option to disable other players' effects which would not lessen the video quality of the environment for enjoyment.

+50 here from me, and each time this come up. Flashes are not art. Visual noise is not art. This would be a huge QoL item.

I agree something has to be done when it comes to visual effects when its a big ball of light so you cannot even see the enemy or its animations. It would be nice if we could toggle off effects of equipments and infusions of others. I do not know what can be done about skill visuals as I still want to see combo fields on the ground and so but it definetly needs toning down. I wonder if things were this bad in the past when I didn't play yet.

They removed elementalist auras because they were "too distracting" but those auras were nothing compared to what we have now. With the exception of combo fields, there's no reason why any player needs to actually see the weapon/skill effects of another player if they don't want to. It's actually hard to impossible to see combo fields now because there's so many effects going on over them which results in them being far less engaging.

Boss tells are also impossible to see when you literally cannot see their model. Also model culling does not prioritize bosses so even if you turn model culling on to the highest setting for performance reasons, there's no small chance that the boss' model will be invisible anyway. (And then there's the Madusa's gaze ability where the eye is literally too high to see on some models so you have no idea when you should look away to avoid being frozen...)

"We don't want you to play the interface" falls rather flat when, if you're melee, the only way to see that you're in melee range and hitting a boss is to look at your auto-attack skill and see if the boss is in range or not because there are so many weapon and skill effects going off on top of the large, particle effect laden skins that you cannot see what your character is doing. Honestly, at this point I tend to just range auto-attack on bosses because I can't see anything going on in melee range and there's too many mechanics that insta-down you where it's impossible to see when to dodge. My DPS is less than it would be otherwise but my QoL skyrockets when I can actually see the occasional tell or avoid a poison/fire field instead of dying to it and having to run back from a waypoint all because there was no way to see it through all the frivolous effects.

"Miniatures have been hidden due to rising player population"

This is a solution that could be implemented for other visual and audio effects. As player population increases in an area, automatically turn off or severely reduce the occurrence of special visual and audio effects.

I like the crazy effects this game offers, but not when there are 20+ people in one place using them.

Alternately, given that they provide so many 'templates' for your account (Equipment, Build, etc) why not a quick toggle for visual/audio setting templates that the user can set? I would be happy to have a A/V Template that was toned down for zergs and group play, and another that's ramped up for small group, instance and solo play.

As an aside, I dislike that I cannot tell what is happening on the ground during large player combat. Is it a Combo Field? Is it an AoE that hurts me? Is it someone's fancy footprints? Who knows!!!

the joy's of playing with max setting. most of that got a checkbox in the general setting, you can reduce the amount of displayed playermodels in the grafic settings. that beeing said, not facetanking is out of the question?

Blade and soul did nice thing in regards of this. With a press of a button you hide all player models and skills, everything and only their names are visible. This increases FPS (because yiu dont nned to render all their models and skills) but it gets rid of all this clutter too

When you target something there is a ring on the ground beneath where your target is standing. It would be nice if that ring was a bit more noticeable and had an arrow pointing in the direction that the target is facing.

Obviously it would be nicer if the game didn't look like this, but I don't really see that changing.

Jesus christ on a salted cracker, yes, this, a thousand times.

Given that they've largeyly ignored the issue and instead stacked it worse and worse over the years, I doubt we will ever see it resolved. I mean they genuinely thought on a Guild Chat that blizzard border effect was a positive addition. That says it all about the priority of this issue

@KrivukasLT.3507 said:Blade and soul did nice thing in regards of this. With a press of a button you hide all player models and skills, everything and only their names are visible. This increases FPS (because yiu dont nned to render all their models and skills) but it gets rid of all this clutter too

There is a hide models button in the settings. But this doesn't get rid of any visual effects. Players just get a basic appearance. I'm not sure one can hide an actual player fully. I would still like to see other players tho but just not its effects that are shiny. When I'm in a big blob I only see name tags and a big lightball in general as the rest simply won't load apart from name tags and a few players next to me.

This really needs to be adressed moving forward if they want this game to continue on for years to come. The competition has robust systems for this (look at ff14), it should be THAT hard for anet to look at the competition and adapt.

I agree with everything except the request about the pony bow.

Do you have effect LOD off (Effect LOD limits detail of particle effects.) and post processing off?Character Model Limit may also help.Post processing adds a bunch of bloom effects.

If it's for PVE purposes then maybe turning off "Show All Player Names" would help you in addition to turning off "Always Show Squad Health Bars".

You also have to add the flashy backpieces that have been supposed to tank FPS. They don't seem to be affected by Model Limit.

This too is also a problem I can not stand seeing in the game... these FPS sponges.

Once again... Give the players an option to disable other players infusions before you even think about adding another one to the game!

For starters I'd like an option to turn my damage numbers off. When I drop two or tree renegade AoEs my enemies are completely obscured by a wall of text. I don't NEED to see my damage, I know what are possibilities of my character AND I have combat log if I'm really curious.

It would definitely help the FPS, that's for sure.Some of the fights can get ridiculous.

Ok managed to find others with the same issue, as a newbie who's doing mainly PvE stuff, I sometimes just stand there within a few meters to a mob with other players but not hitting it as I'm not close enough due to being bombarded with spells.

@XceptOne.9134 said:Ok managed to find others with the same issue, as a newbie who's doing mainly PvE stuff, I sometimes just stand there within a few meters to a mob with other players but not hitting it as I'm not close enough due to being bombarded with spells.

Sure, personally I like range in Open world content and wvw zergs for that matter, partly because all the visual spam can cause me to be unable to see the target, see other targets, tell which I have targeted and its worse the closer to the object (and effects). Before some bright helpfull person suggests I look for the red arrow over the target and the red circle under them I will just say Mhmm I wish I could see them it would be helpful. This even happens in certain fractals. Some times the best thing is to just hit target nearest/next and keep hitting your shit if you see some numbers, well it must be ok.... Sure this game is designed with skilled active play in mind...