Overhead healthbars: Remove them for enemy players in PVP!

Arato

The alliance tags are bad enough, we shouldn't have overhead billboards announcing our location when we're behind a tree, rock, cresting over a hill, around a corner, etc.

Teargrants

You don't know how crouching works do you?

Arato

Using stealth burns stamina. Having easy to see symbols pop out over your head is pretty stupid and should probably remain in WoW.

rotiferuk

Arato wrote: »

Using stealth burns stamina.

I only use stamina when I moving in sneak. It recharges when I'm just crouching. Mind you, that could be something to do with my medium armour passives.

LadyChaos

it only burns when moving, correct.
It regens when you stop moving, correct.
For all.

Draconiuos

You think that is bad, read the last few pages of this guy's thread. He wants to add a nameplate above your head in pvp, because it is how all the "hardcore MMOs do their pvp".

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/628741#Comment_628741

Mobius0

I like healthbars, and wish that they would also add nameplates, and guild tags.

This is coming from a stealth PvPer who has to hide behind objects hundreds of times per day.

Now, fixing corpses so that they don't keep you locked in combat, would go MUCH further to fix issues.

Arato

Draconiuos wrote: »

You think that is bad, read the last few pages of this guy's thread. He wants to add a nameplate above your head in pvp, because it is how all the "hardcore MMOs do their pvp".

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/628741#Comment_628741

Yep, I'm aware of that thread and I'm vehemently against adding nameplates being added to PVP.

There's nothing hardcore about having big arrows pointing at your enemies even when you have 0 situational awareness. That's as ezmode and casual as it gets.

I think you should be able to hide and ambush without having to use mechanical invisibility (stealth being invisibility is stupid to begin with), just using your environment.

If you want hardcore: No invisibility mechanics outside of short term spells, no nameplates, no floating symbols over people's heads, armor makes noise that other people can hear and sneaking works by reducing sound of your footsteps/armor noise.

Mobius0

Arato wrote: »

Draconiuos wrote: »

You think that is bad, read the last few pages of this guy's thread. He wants to add a nameplate above your head in pvp, because it is how all the "hardcore MMOs do their pvp".

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/628741#Comment_628741

Yep, I'm aware of that thread and I'm vehemently against adding nameplates being added to PVP.

There's nothing hardcore about having big arrows pointing at your enemies even when you have 0 situational awareness. That's as ezmode and casual as it gets.

I think you should be able to hide and ambush without having to use mechanical invisibility (stealth being invisibility is stupid to begin with), just using your environment.

If you want hardcore: No invisibility mechanics outside of short term spells, no nameplates, no floating symbols over people's heads, armor makes noise that other people can hear and sneaking works by reducing sound of your footsteps/armor noise.

And we should all have to choose between having a rifle, light machine gun, sub machine gun, or shotgun, as we log in. And of course, we should remove levels from the system, and maybe just have a few perks to choose from.

Or we can have the game actually be a MMORPG, where there a good balance of hardcore PvP, and good immersion. Having no nameplates kills immersion, makes guilds and players less recognized, and makes it hard as hell to keep track of your friends and guildmates on the battlefield.

Though you could have the option to turn it off - I'd be cool with that.

TheGrandAlliance

Its hard enough to tell who is a Player vs NPC. Now you want to make it impossbile to tell whether a player is hostile or not?

Man... most epixxx indeed...

Sykotik_ESO

Clearly PvP in ESO is not for you bro.

Arato

Mobius0 wrote: »

Arato wrote: »

Draconiuos wrote: »

You think that is bad, read the last few pages of this guy's thread. He wants to add a nameplate above your head in pvp, because it is how all the "hardcore MMOs do their pvp".

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/628741#Comment_628741

Yep, I'm aware of that thread and I'm vehemently against adding nameplates being added to PVP.

There's nothing hardcore about having big arrows pointing at your enemies even when you have 0 situational awareness. That's as ezmode and casual as it gets.

I think you should be able to hide and ambush without having to use mechanical invisibility (stealth being invisibility is stupid to begin with), just using your environment.

If you want hardcore: No invisibility mechanics outside of short term spells, no nameplates, no floating symbols over people's heads, armor makes noise that other people can hear and sneaking works by reducing sound of your footsteps/armor noise.

And we should all have to choose between having a rifle, light machine gun, sub machine gun, or shotgun, as we log in. And of course, we should remove levels from the system, and maybe just have a few perks to choose from.

Or we can have the game actually be a MMORPG, where there a good balance of hardcore PvP, and good immersion. Having no nameplates kills immersion, makes guilds and players less recognized, and makes it hard as hell to keep track of your friends and guildmates on the battlefield.

Though you could have the option to turn it off - I'd be cool with that.

Uh, I don't think you know what "immersion means" kiddo.

No nameplates enhances immersion. Nameplates make it more "gamey" and contrived looking.

I'd be okay with having ALLIED players having nameplates and healthbars, but not enemies. You say "option" but a nameplate over someone's head that makes them much more visible in the environment, since you know, you don't have to pay attention to the environment, your UI gives away that there's an enemy player there.. that suddenly means if you have the "option" enabled but another player doesn't, they have to pay more attention than you do, you can be barely paying attention at all and see someone cresting over the hill through a forest because of a big arrow pointing at their head saying "I'm an enemy player, attack me!" where they wouldn't see you unless they were looking carefully.

Because of that advantage, that means both players are essentially forced to enable that "option". You have the option to shoot yourself in the foot before starting a footrace too, but nobody does it.

But where was I, oh yes, we don't have nameplates, but what we do have is health bars, and they are "optional" but they convey an advantage in players that have them enabled vs players who do not have them enabled, so they should be locked to only being able to see them when that player has taken damage (default).

If you want to enable enemy NPC healthbars to be always on, go for it, I'm sure the enemy NPC doesn't mind your increased visibility of them vs their visibility of you, but for enemy players? I don't want to turn them on because they're not immersive, but I don't like shooting myself in the foot so I have to have them on. It's not an option.

Mobius0

Arato wrote: »

Uh, I don't think you know what "immersion means" kiddo.

No nameplates enhances immersion. Nameplates make it more "gamey" and contrived looking.

I'd be okay with having ALLIED players having nameplates and healthbars, but not enemies. You say "option" but a nameplate over someone's head that makes them much more visible in the environment, since you know, you don't have to pay attention to the environment, your UI gives away that there's an enemy player there.. that suddenly means if you have the "option" enabled but another player doesn't, they have to pay more attention than you do, you can be barely paying attention at all and see someone cresting over the hill through a forest because of a big arrow pointing at their head saying "I'm an enemy player, attack me!" where they wouldn't see you unless they were looking carefully.

Because of that advantage, that means both players are essentially forced to enable that "option". You have the option to shoot yourself in the foot before starting a footrace too, but nobody does it.

But where was I, oh yes, we don't have nameplates, but what we do have is health bars, and they are "optional" but they convey an advantage in players that have them enabled vs players who do not have them enabled, so they should be locked to only being able to see them when that player has taken damage (default).

If you want to enable enemy NPC healthbars to be always on, go for it, I'm sure the enemy NPC doesn't mind your increased visibility of them vs their visibility of you, but for enemy players? I don't want to turn them on because they're not immersive, but I don't like shooting myself in the foot so I have to have them on. It's not an option.

I've heard this argument being made in the past, but it is simply not true.

If by immersion, you mean having a more hardcore, pure PvP experience, then yes.

But if you mean being able to interact with, roleplay with, socialize with, have rivalries with, etc., other players, then no, not having nameplates is NOT better for immersion.

I literally don't even know who the guy next to me is half the time, in a raid, because I don't have time to mouseover them. They can be saying something, and I don't even realize it's them.

It's also incredibly hard to keep track of people in a large group, because of it, thus making PvP more of a drone affair.

I want to be immersed in a proper roll playing environment, where I can properly interact with other players. I don't want to be some drone, shooting at some other nameless drone, fighting alongside other nameless drones.

Sleepydan

Mobius0 wrote: »

If by immersion, you mean having a more hardcore, pure PvP experience, then yes.

---

I literally don't even know who the guy next to me is half the time, in a raid, because I don't have time to mouseover them. They can be saying something, and I don't even realize it's them.

---

I want to be immersed in a proper roll playing environment, where I can properly interact with other players. I don't want to be some drone, shooting at some other nameless drone, fighting alongside other nameless drones.

Is there something wrong with you?

Mobius0

Sleepydan wrote: »

Is there something wrong with you?

Elaborate?

Sleepydan

Sure.

Immersion has always been in respect to rp and "second life"-ing it. Everything that makes the game less real and more like a game fights immersion. Do you see nameplates hovering over people on the street?

You don't know the genesis of speech. It's literally to the left of the comment you read. There is never a situation where you wouldn't know who said what.

You relate having no nameplate as being a drone. Conventional wisdom hold that navigating a cluttered ui, while useful for optimization, is much more drone like behavior.


None of those points make sense to me at all

Nox_Aeterna

No , dont remove them.

AND add the nameplates devs, those who dont like may turn it off.

Mobius0

Sleepydan wrote: »

Sure.

Immersion has always been in respect to rp and "second life"-ing it. Everything that makes the game less real and more like a game fights immersion. Do you see nameplates hovering over people on the street?

You don't know the genesis of speech. It's literally to the left of the comment you read. There is never a situation where you wouldn't know who said what.

You relate having no nameplate as being a drone. Conventional wisdom hold that navigating a cluttered ui, while useful for optimization, is much more drone like behavior.


None of those points make sense to me at all

In real life, people are big and life sized. Not small images on a little screen that are hard to distinguish. I can also hear them speak, so it's obvious who is doing so.

I can tell you that this is the least immersive MMO I have ever played! The lack of player names, lack of guild tags, lack of chat bubbles, and use of account names in guild chat, is seemingly trying very hard to kill immersion.

Even hard core, mandatory RP games, display character names. I've seen this same discussion come up since I started playing text games in '96. And it's been shown time and time again, that lack of names, though novel in some ways, actually makes it so much more difficult to follow who is who, and to interact, that, in the end, it just makes the experience worse for roleplaying.

Now, I'm not saying everyone in Cyrodiil wants to run around "roleplaying" in the most commonly held sense. But the reality is that this IS a MMORPG, and pretty much everyone plays these games because of the roleplaying game aspects (as I pointed out in my previous post, in which I was obviously referring to FPS games.).

The kind of immersion you are talking about, is more graphical in nature, and is the kind of experience more suited to a single player RPG. I can say this through experience, because you don't even need 3D graphics at all, to have immersion (i.e. text). To me, the extra bit of that type of "immersion" you gain, because of lack of nameplates, healthbars, etc., is far outweighed by the loss of the type of immersion I am talking about.

Darka

I always find these threads turn into

PVPer A- Only the lolbadslol need feature x, real pvpers do not need it
PVPer B - No as a PvPer i feel that this tool/feature would be handy
PVPer A - Wow, your opinion is now irrelevent because you are not what i deem a real pvper like myself, who is a true hardcore pvper best of the best, so hard core pvp and for hard core pvp that i wont play the hard core pvp games that exist, im that hard core. Seriously you lolbadslol learn to play, my 2yo son controls my toon in pvp it is that easy and he does that with out feature X

Topic derailed, and we find out who the Emperor of the PVP campaign known as The Forums is.

SuperScrubby

People say immersion like you are looking through the eyes of your character. Maybe some do, but a good amount of players also play in the 3rd person which comes in handy for PvP.

Also if you want to speak about immersion you're usually relating to something "realistic" or what you see in nature. But like in nature and the "1st" person perspective you can identify people based on their size, features, face. Many factors are used to identify people. In a video game there are none of these factors. You can't tell there's a hitch in someones step, or their true height.

So to say that you want immersion in a video game is pretty redundant. If you want immersion then get a rift and play 1st person only with no UI. But any game has to have options and make concessions. I don't know where these "immersion" people come from, but I've personally never played a game where this term was thrown around so much. Personally it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Sleepydan

I find that immersing myself in the system of the game to be counterproductive in the goal of immersing myself in the world, in the moment, in the fight.

In other games (lol) you almost always needed to have some ui mods to heal properly. And that same mod always seemed to turn healing into whack-a-mole. System immersion and experience immersion are almost always at odds as far as I can tell. Immersion, Ermershun. Ugh. I'm getting outta here.

Mobius0

Sleepydan wrote: »

I find that immersing myself in the system of the game to be counterproductive in the goal of immersing myself in the world, in the moment, in the fight.

In other games (lol) you almost always needed to have some ui mods to heal properly. And that same mod always seemed to turn healing into whack-a-mole. System immersion and experience immersion are almost always at odds as far as I can tell. Immersion, Ermershun. Ugh. I'm getting outta here.

Healing in this game is all either automatic, or AoE. It's so easy, a monkey could do it. You don't even have to target, so what's your point?

Arato

Mobius0 wrote: »

I've heard this argument being made in the past, but it is simply not true.

If by immersion, you mean having a more hardcore, pure PvP experience, then yes.

But if you mean being able to interact with, roleplay with, socialize with, have rivalries with, etc., other players, then no, not having nameplates is NOT better for immersion.

I literally don't even know who the guy next to me is half the time, in a raid, because I don't have time to mouseover them. They can be saying something, and I don't even realize it's them.

It's also incredibly hard to keep track of people in a large group, because of it, thus making PvP more of a drone affair.

I want to be immersed in a proper roll playing environment, where I can properly interact with other players. I don't want to be some drone, shooting at some other nameless drone, fighting alongside other nameless drones.

Again kid, you don't know what immersion means.

Immersion means that you feel as if you are almost LIVING in the game, like the game blurs the line between fantasy and reality, you are IMMERSED in the game to where it no longer feels like a game anymore. Game conventions like flashy UI's detract from that, because they're constant reminders that what you are doing is a game, and not real, unless the HUD makes sense for the setting, such as the UI in the Metroid Prime games, they did an excellent job of presenting the UI information in a way that feels real in the game world because it's in Samus' helmet, complete with the sections where your vision is blocked because the see through visor isn't there and it's an opaque material, and raindrops and steam building up on the visor, or reflections of Samus's eyes on the inner glass of the visor, or the way the visor's curved.

But for an Elder Scrolls game, having a bunch of fancy computer targeting and scanning and lock on information on the screen doesn't make sense, so Bethesda and Zenimax have gone for a minimalistic UI to preserve an immersive experience since Morrowind. The UI has been small, out of the way during most aspects of gameplay, and there are no floating names, so that if your vision is on the center of the screen, you can just take in the game world and get lost in the experience, rather than being constantly reminded this is just a video game.

Mobius0

Arato wrote: »

Again kid, you don't know what immersion means.

Immersion means that you feel as if you are almost LIVING in the game, like the game blurs the line between fantasy and reality, you are IMMERSED in the game to where it no longer feels like a game anymore. Game conventions like flashy UI's detract from that, because they're constant reminders that what you are doing is a game, and not real, unless the HUD makes sense for the setting, such as the UI in the Metroid Prime games, they did an excellent job of presenting the UI information in a way that feels real in the game world because it's in Samus' helmet, complete with the sections where your vision is blocked because the see through visor isn't there and it's an opaque material, and raindrops and steam building up on the visor, or reflections of Samus's eyes on the inner glass of the visor, or the way the visor's curved.

But for an Elder Scrolls game, having a bunch of fancy computer targeting and scanning and lock on information on the screen doesn't make sense, so Bethesda and Zenimax have gone for a minimalistic UI to preserve an immersive experience since Morrowind. The UI has been small, out of the way during most aspects of gameplay, and there are no floating names, so that if your vision is on the center of the screen, you can just take in the game world and get lost in the experience, rather than being constantly reminded this is just a video game.

Thank you for explaining to me, what I pretty much explained already in my previous post.

Immersion can also refer to me getting into the role of my character. Feeling like you are living the life of that character, and am part of something. It's a more social and role type immersion, than a visual immersion.

As I said - the former is suited for a MMORPG, the latter is suited for a single player RPG. This is not Skyrim. It's an MMO.

You can preach your form of immersion all you want, but the reality, is I have NEVER felt so detached from a game before. I feel like my only identity is my account name, or my character's name in zone chat. Nobody knows who my character is. They can see him, and not even know it's him.

Arato

Immersion is blurring the line between game and reality, and being in the WORLD. you're not looking for immersion, you're looking for convenience.

Mobius0

Arato wrote: »

Immersion is blurring the line between game and reality, and being in the WORLD. you're not looking for immersion, you're looking for convenience.

Convenience of better immersing myself in the role of my character, yes.