UI: This is NOT ok

[Kiki.9450]

42 minutes ago, Lucy.3728 said:

How does it look in wow?

All I know about that game is its name.

I'm for better visibility of important buffs and debuffs.

I don't normally tell people to go watch streams (bleh) but I'll recommend it here. A few minutes per should be enough? I will also note that everyone makes their UI different in that game because they can, either using the game's built-in HUD customisation options or by downloading addons. What's important to Johnny "First to Clear Mythic Raids" Jenkins isn't important to me (mid-tier raider), and what's important to me may not be important to Sam "I Just Play for Fun on the Weekends" Smith, who may not even raid LFR ('baby' mode).

Johnny would have several addons to pull only the most important combat data, and likely has it situated close to the centre of his screen. He also probably has several addons to customise the design of his UI, has set up his bars in a very specific pattern, and et cetera to fully control his UI. Being a top tier raider, he needs this sort of control.

I use the base UI, and few addons. I don't centre addon information right by the centre of my screen, but I do have things placed so that I can still watch important boss timers (while learning a new boss encounter, matters much less once I know the fight inside out). My buffs and debuffs are visible to me and don't overlap with other UI elements because I have them set to wrap around once the row is filled. (I've had moments in GW2 where my buffs hide under my map because there's so many.) Additionally, my mount bar hides when I'm in combat (base UI element!) seeing as I can't mount in combat in WoW anyway. I'm here for fun and for challenge, but I know my limits and care not to push past them. No top tier raiding or mythic-plus dungeons for me. I don't play meta, but some of my guildmates do and they're fine with me and other guildmates playing what we find fun, even if it's not the best. 

Sam might not have customised her UI at all. She might not have any addons either. If she does, they may not be combat-focused addons, but other sorts, like inventory management, mini-pet management, etc. Sam likely plays open world, and maybe casual heroic dungeons, or battlegrounds, or LFR as the hardest content she'll touch. She might not be looking for a challenge and just wants to have fun. 

One thing to note: after Dragonflight introduced the updated HUD, several players wanted the old version back. Between addons and players simply sharing the string they created for their UI (using the DF customisable UI to make it as close in appearance as possible to the Vanilla UI), these players should be in a good spot.

Edited February 22 by Kiki.9450
Typo

[Cuks.8241]

I dont want wow addons. It was one of the reason I quit wow. Not really the base custom UI mods, those were ok to a point. But very soon they basically became a necessary cheat. At some point they became mandatory and the game started to be balanced around them. And it came to a point where you weren't playing a game anymore but just follow instructions from a mod. Mostly talking about raiding. I managed to raid pretty much all content up to the end of wotlk without DBM (deadly boss mods) and it was already the norm at the time but later on it was basically mandatory. 

Similarly in arena. Most if not all mods were banned in tournaments but no one could monitor you in arena and without some of the mods you were clearly subpar.

All that we need is the ability to move and resize different elements of the UI. Basically target frame and boon, condi and effect tables for player and target. With that we should be fine to do pretty much anything and not have any advantage over other players. And yeah I also like to pile up everything in my FOV. Usually centred on the bottom part of the screen. So I can get all the info in one glance. Now it's all over the place and not very well structured.

Also wow was not the first to do this. Many older games, including mmorpgs had the ability to move and/or resize each element.

[Sobx.1758]

I don't care about movable ui outside of reworked, regrouped and movable boonbars.

Edited February 22 by Sobx.1758

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Apolo.5942 said:

They dint want a trinity either and we all know how that turned out.

The fact they dont want it, is not exactly a good point.

True. The fact that they coded it in one way (and have mentioned multiple times that even small adjustments/additions to UI can be highly problematic to them) however likely is.

[Obtena.7952]

Here is a joke: What kind of gamer can't move their eyes over their screen? A bad one. 

If your FOV is just that circle in the middle, something wrong on your side, not the game. Honestly, that's part of the skill of being a gamer.  

But customizable UI would be nice, like a luxury, which makes it a low priority item IMO. Game is most certainly playable without it. 

Edited February 22 by Obtena.7952

[kiroho.4738]

7 hours ago, Apolo.5942 said:

The magenta is your field of view vision during combat.

No it's not.

[Sobx.1758]

18 minutes ago, kiroho.4738 said:

No it's not.

Agreed

[Tinker.6924]

The current UI is OK until you go into combat and then its awful.

If we look to real life for inspiration at a profession where the quality of the UI is literally a matter of life and death, then look at the heads up display technology available to fighter pilots.  Every piece of info relevant to combat decision making is projected in their visor so that the pilot can see the enemy and the decision making data simultaneously, no taking their eyes off the other plane to look at readouts and controls elsewhere.  The edge provided by a good HUD UI can be the difference between killing your enemy and being killed.

That's basically what the OP and others wants for combat situations. 

36 minutes ago, kiroho.4738 said:

The magenta is your field of view vision during combat.

Correct, if you aren't looking at the interior of the magenta circle where combat is occurring, you aren't paying attention to combat.  To suggest that players have "super human fields of vision" as some posters have tried is laughable.

WoW does this with addons.  Its UI is written in the non-proprietary (but not well known) Lua programming language and Blizz has an extensive API.  The addons do provide an unparalleled level of customization with various degrees of ease from basic all the way up to expert.  All addons are required to be free for their functionality.  You can customize not just for combat vs no-combat but even for types of combat (open-world, 5-man group, raids, etc...) as well as other factors like which character/class you are currently using.

Edited February 22 by Tinker.6924

[Cuks.8241]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

True. The fact that they coded it in one way (and have mentioned multiple times that even small adjustments/additions to UI can be highly problematic to them) however likely is.

They really shouldn't say that. It's basically saying we're incompetent. Especially if you see some of the UI mods very small teams or just one person is able to put together for some of the games. Like SkyUI. One of the most popular mods for Skyrim. And yeah most of us don't know how much work is really required but as a customer no one really cares, it's just comparison to other similar products.

And to people in this thread that have super FOV. Please go to a pvp situation, look for specific skill animations on enemy that you might need to counter, which conditions and boons are ticking on you and enemy target boon/condi table so you won't cc into stability for example. Not saying no one can do this but this game for sure makes it very hard. I have a very hard time in this game to keep track of all of these things and I'm quite sure it's not just me getting old.

[kiroho.4738]

2 hours ago, Tinker.6924 said:

 

3 hours ago, kiroho.4738 said:

The magenta is your field of view vision during combat.

 

I never wrote that.

Dude, stop quoting me wrong...
What the heck!...

Edited February 23 by kiroho.4738

[Shuzuru.3651]

10 hours ago, Tinker.6924 said:

Correct, if you aren't looking at the interior of the magenta circle where combat is occurring, you aren't paying attention to combat.  To suggest that players have "super human fields of vision" as some posters have tried is laughable.

It has nothing to do with a "super humain field of vision"

Let's take the problem there and solve it :

1 You have a screen with combat in the center and ui on the side of the screen

2 You move all the ui infos to the side of the magenta zone to be able to see them

3 You now have a screen with all the ui and combat on the magenta zone

4 The outer of the magenta now useless because there is nothing there and you can't see it anyway

5 You trim the useless outer zone, so now the magenta zone is your whole screen

6 You're back to step 1

 

Fun fact : almost every game I ever play put the ui (so relevant combat info) on the side of screen...

[frazazel.7501]

8 hours ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

It has nothing to do with a "super humain field of vision"

Let's take the problem there and solve it :

1 You have a screen with combat in the center and ui on the side of the screen

2 You move all the ui infos to the side of the magenta zone to be able to see them

3 You now have a screen with all the ui and combat on the magenta zone

4 The outer of the magenta now useless because there is nothing there and you can't see it anyway

5 You trim the useless outer zone, so now the magenta zone is your whole screen

6 You're back to step 1

 

Fun fact : almost every game I ever play put the ui (so relevant combat info) on the side of screen...

If you want to move everything closer together, just resize your game window to be smaller, zoom your camera in a bit, and then increase the UI size to compensate. Easy!

[Cuks.8241]

17 minutes ago, frazazel.7501 said:

If you want to move everything closer together, just resize your game window to be smaller, zoom your camera in a bit, and then increase the UI size to compensate. Easy!

The funny thing is, the game doesnt really let you do this properly. Fov setting is fine and camera settings are fine. You should be able to lock camera zoom but game changing your zoom is only problem in pve and I dont really care about pve here because its pace is slower and you need to track much less stuff so the ui is not that important.

The annoying part is the ui scaling. Its only one setting for all ui elements. And it only has like 4 or 5 settings. So you make it big and you clog your screen with useless ui elements that dont matter in combat. Or you make it smaller to open up your peripheral but make it harder to track important stuff like condi orders.

[Shuzuru.3651]

1 hour ago, frazazel.7501 said:

If you want to move everything closer together, just resize your game window to be smaller, zoom your camera in a bit, and then increase the UI size to compensate. Easy!

Or, you know, take a step back from your screen, if you can only see a quarter of your screen, that's penalizing for every game you'll play on it. It's more a global problem than a gw2 specific one.

[Lucy.3728]

On 2/22/2024 at 9:58 PM, Obtena.7952 said:

Here is a joke: What kind of gamer can't move their eyes over their screen? A bad one.

The money of a bad player is just same as of a good player.

How much money would Anet make if all "bad" ones leave?

I couldn't even do the Griffon adventure races without disabling the B and G key because I often triggered that instead of V.
I managed all with gold reward, after many tries, just without the wvw or guild menu poping up in the middle of my screen.

On 2/22/2024 at 8:26 PM, Kiki.9450 said:

I will also note that everyone makes their UI different in that game because they can

Sounds awesome.

In Aion (the mmo I played before GW2) I could adjust some things too. Best were the skill bars. There were 9 of them and you could have 1 on your screen (placing whereever), navigating with arrows between them, or 2 or more if you were crazy enough. And you could just put anything in a skillbar. Potions, scrolls, weapons, armor, even emotes and tags/markers. 🥰
I used 2 of them. One at the bottom where you'd expect it and one on the right hand side of the screen.

I miss that.
It is annoying in GW2 to open the inventory whenever I need to refresh my consumables or place a siege in wvw and I play wvw a lot. And obscuring half of your screen at an enemy objective can lead to death.

Edited February 25 by Lucy.3728

[Urud.4925]

The thing that I hate is when a boss has so many icons that keep changing place. It happened several times that I want to link a boss' buff in chat (for example the blue guardian's immunity that you have to strip, if you are doing a w1 training run, or the wet debuff during Matthias) and I end up for linking a different icon because in the meantime the boss got different conditions. I'm not sure I'll like 2 rows of icons, but maybe is the only solution. But most importantly, they should put dots (bleeding/burning, poison...) on a different row than buffs/debuffs used by bosses for some mechanic.

[Teknomancer.4895]

On 2/22/2024 at 8:58 AM, Apolo.5942 said:

My bad, there fixed it, not 30 years ago, but 20... thats much much better...

No need to go back that far, we can also look at STO, another GFX-and-particle-heavy MMO, released only 2 years before GW2. It has a fully player-customizable HUD (clips not enabled, skip to time sig 3:00 for demo).

Not only older games but also GW2's contemporaries allow for customization. If it's really a performance issue, then it was a self-imposed one since other games of the time have equivalent particle spam and complex 3D player movement and positioning, yet allow for UI customization.

Edited February 25 by Teknomancer.4895
clarity

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

On 2/22/2024 at 8:58 PM, Sobx.1758 said:

I don't care about movable ui outside of reworked, regrouped and movable boonbars.

Boons
Conditions
Profession specific buffs(Bounding Dodger for example)
Rest in separate bar, food/utility separated maybe

Also locked position for boons and conditions on both your HUD and targeted player/enemy to avoid boons and conditions bouncing around.

[Apolo.5942]

50 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

No need to go back that far, we can also look at STO, another GFX-and-particle-heavy MMO, released only 2 years before GW2. It has a fully player-customizable HUD (clips not enabled, skip to time sig 3:00 for demo).

Not only older games but also GW2's contemporaries allow for customization. If it's really a performance issue, then it was a self-imposed one since other games of the time have equivalent particle spam and complex 3D player movement and positioning, yet allow for UI customization.

While moving things around would be an improvement.

It is nowhere near what you can do in wow.

WOW should be the customization target, not GW1.

[Sobx.1758]

44 minutes ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

Boons
Conditions
Profession specific buffs(Bounding Dodger for example)
Rest in separate bar, food/utility separated maybe

Also locked position for boons and conditions on both your HUD and targeted player/enemy to avoid boons and conditions bouncing around.

Agreed, just didn't feel like typing more 😄

On 2/17/2024 at 3:16 PM, Sobx.1758 said:

Split it into categories, maybe even set each boon in its own static place (similarly to http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/ ), make the ones that are inactive semi-transparent, light up the ones active. Separate "cluster" for class effects could be without set positions. Add a tick box in settings menu to "enable dragging" so players can put them wherever they want on their screen. The remaining banner/booster/special effects remain grouped together (these don't need static places) and are also available to be put in any place the player wants on the screen.

Edited February 25 by Sobx.1758