UI Suggestion to ANet

[Eldor.4201]

Dear ArenaNet Team,

I’m not sure where to write this suggestion, but I hope you will see it and respond.

I believe this suggestion was made before on forums, but I just wanted to ressurect it on a clean page. I have a problem with GW2 UI. Let me tell you my situation:

Guys… I’m getting old. And it become harder for me to see boon durations, conditions on boss, or cooldown counters. In every MMO I’ve played before, I place target frame right next to player frame, so I can easily see that I’m taking damage and/or I have to burst dps boss. I place both player and target frame right above my action bars, so I can easily see my avoidance abilities and/or dps abilities cds are up. If I’m healer, I place party/squad frame close to the center. If I have to track my boons (for ex. Engineer’s Explosive Temper trait buff), I place boon frame right side of my characters head. If I have an additional power bar to track, I place it close to target frame…

Long story short, I use a compact UI and gather every frame I have to see during combat, at the bottom of my screen. In Guild Wars 2, we have to check 3 sides of our screen during combat. GW2 is an action-paced game, and in action paced games, players should focus to the center of screen. I tried to use larger scale in the game, but then I realize I cant see the game:)I know that you are working on next xpack, and you are busy. I’m not suggesting that you can allow addons for this. I’m just suggesting that, PLEASE, let us place and scale this beautiful game’s UI elements separately. And if there is a reason why you are not doing it, please let us know.

Kind regards,

[lare.5129]

may be u should better ask meake addons more friendly to all ?

[kharmin.7683]

@"Eldor.4201" said:Dear ArenaNet Team,

I’m not sure where to write this suggestion, but I hope you will see it and respond.QoL Suggestions go here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/53097/suggestions-qol-quality-of-life-ideas-merged Anet has stated that they review that thread.

[Tukaram.8256]

I completely agree.A lot of games let you move any part of the UI around the screen. On GW2 everything is thrown on the screen higgledy-piggledy. I end up ignoring it all, except my health bar, and the critters health bar. I do not have time to be looking all over the screen for misc timers boons etc. Too much junk and no way to organize it.

[lare.5129]

but we should not ask that from anet. It can be done bu side developers if addons will be more friendly in gw2 eco system

[anduriell.6280]

@Tukaram.8256 said:I completely agree.A lot of games let you move any part of the UI around the screen. On GW2 everything is thrown on the screen higgledy-piggledy. I end up ignoring it all, except my health bar, and the critters health bar. I do not have time to be looking all over the screen for misc timers boons etc. Too much junk and no way to organize it.

It would be better to be able to see the icons for boons on the selected target just over the toon. Normally i don't look at the skill bar or the top of the screen when i'm playing against other players and that would go miles so i would know easily when a target has stability or resistance on.

[Eldor.4201]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@"Eldor.4201" said:Dear ArenaNet Team,

I’m not sure where to write this suggestion, but I hope you will see it and respond.QoL Suggestions go here:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/53097/suggestions-qol-quality-of-life-ideas-merged

Anet has stated that they review that thread.

Thanks my friend.

[Hypnowulf.7403]

For what it's worth? I agree. I'm all about accessibility, it's something I rant about regularly on my nobody Twitter account that absolutely no one reads. Which is fine! I mean, I'm socially anxious, I'd probably not like to get too popular. So I'm all about this. Do we have colourblind options yet? If not, that'd be a good include, too.

Honestly, I'd even go so far as to say that it's time for ArenaNet to open up their back-end—so to speak—and give us access to everything. I'm suggesting a lua-based addon system, which has become so popular in so many MMOs. This game, admittely, has a beuatiful UI. It has some very intelligent choices in it so not too much would need changing... However, there are accessibility concerns.

I don't know if it's realistic for ArenaNet, right now, to be able to include them all as much as I'd want that. I do want that. Sadly, it's the corporate suits who're always in the way here. If it was the choice of anyone else? Sure. The suits only see money, and they'd see this as an outgoing cost, which would have them weigh the gain. For them, the gain wouldn't be great enough because hooray for capitalism and greed. It's short-sighted too, really, since it'd allow more differently abled people to play.

I think the better sell would be to ask for UI addons. The case can be made here for how successful it is in other games, and that competitive spirit can be played upon to point out that this is something that their games have that yours does not. I feel that there we might gain traction. If we did, then we could fix these accessibility issues ourselves. I'd help! I've done this sort of thing before.

[Cuks.8241]

No UI addons, please. Don't want what happened to WoW where certain addons became mandatory for raiding (deadly boss mod) and raids were actually balanced with dbm in mind. It completely destroyed the immersion of raiding where people should respond to visual and sound queues, not mod messages. It was one of the reasons I quit Wow raiding soon after woltk because raiding stopped being a RPG game and became a screen full of stats and queues and sheets. The "game" part, the graphics were almost redundant. Healing was the worst (didn't help woltk was an era of full spam healing all raid long).Also, some pvp or arena mods were on the limit of cheats. Luckily no mods were allowed for arena tournaments.Every time I installed the game the first day was only dedicated to setting up the mods. And I was probably on the minimum of what most of the community use.

Just the ability to move and resize specific elements of UI would be more than enough.

[DebraKadabra.5278]

All I really want is an on screen FPS counter that isn't in the Options Menu.

[Tukaram.8256]

No addons needed - just make the items on the UI draggable. Let us decide where to put things. Even the graphic antique, 20 year old Ultima Online has that!

[Ashantara.8731]

@Hypnowulf.7403 said:For what it's worth? I agree. I'm all about accessibility, [...]

Especially since GW1 was offering that feature. No idea why they cut so many things that were great about GW1 from GW2 when designing the engine (and system).

[Eldor.4201]

@"Cuks.8241" said:No UI addons, please. Don't want what happened to WoW where certain addons became mandatory for raiding (deadly boss mod) and raids were actually balanced with dbm in mind. It completely destroyed the immersion of raiding where people should respond to visual and sound queues, not mod messages. It was one of the reasons I quit Wow raiding soon after woltk because raiding stopped being a RPG game and became a screen full of stats and queues and sheets. The "game" part, the graphics were almost redundant. Healing was the worst (didn't help woltk was an era of full spam healing all raid long).Also, some pvp or arena mods were on the limit of cheats. Luckily no mods were allowed for arena tournaments.Every time I installed the game the first day was only dedicated to setting up the mods. And I was probably on the minimum of what most of the community use.

Just the ability to move and resize specific elements of UI would be more than enough.

I'm totally aggree with you my friend. Addons in WoW become mandatory rather than QoL situation. I aggree especially to "where people should respond to visual and sound queues" this sentence of yours. This is what make raiding in GW2 so fun and challenging. Thats why all I ask is just a simple UI editor.

[kharmin.7683]

@DebraKadabra.5278 said:All I really want is an on screen FPS counter that isn't in the Options Menu.

I launch GW2 through the Steam client which allows for this in their overlay.