Enemy endurance bar

#81 - Dec. 2, 2013, 12:45 p.m.

In a attempt to make this discussion a bit less hostile because I’m not sure what is so contentious here I’ll chime in a bit with some of the game design reasoning for what we show.

1) Having a bunch of hidden stuff is generally bad. Being able to keep track of hidden stuff doesn’t really improve the skill cap of the game in a good way. It just creates a bunch of confusion for most players and a bunch of not fun management for those that can deal with it. I would rather their skill was being used in more controllable areas of the game that place skillful and fun demands on those players.

2) There is a cutoff for what we can show both from a UI standpoint and from a technical standpoint and from a design standpoint.

• UI: We want a glance at an enemy to provide the most important information possible and not be full of clutter. You can see first hand (skill effects) how clutter can detract from a game and this was one area where I think we succeeded in keeping clutter down. If we show endurance, what else do we want to show and how slippery is that slope.
• Technically: We want to limit the amount of information that your computer needs to have in order to play the game. This means that players with lower bandwidth can still play the game without requiring the server to relay too much information to them. The argument that I have more bandwidth and want to turn it is not going to work here because we build an environment and establish the minimum requirements to enter that environment and then it is our job to make sure not to design things that take away from the equitable nature of the game.
• Design: Once you start considering these two elements design comes in and has to make judgement calls about what is important. We have to weigh all UI clutter and other screen clutter, not just health only vs health + endurance. We have to weigh all technical limitations not just the cost of sending endurance to each client but what things are necessary so that we can save up for showing things that absolutely are necessary. Now for endurance in particular we take into account things like how static something is. Health is pretty slow moving, relatively speaking to computer cycles and network packets sent. Endurance on the other hand is very transient. It can go from full to empty to full again in a few seconds based on differing factors that have already been mentioned in this thread. For example you might see someone at low endurance so you fire a spell knowing they can’t dodge, but before you finish casting they could weapon swap, refill half way and have a dodge available. This is going to cause players to make decisions based on it that are in actually lacking the full information that they need to really make that decision anyway.

Hopefully that gives you guys some insight into how stuff like this works. For endurance in particular these different factors led us to not report it and leave it off of the UI because we decided to make that trade off in order to make other design decisions. This stuff cascades very quickly and is a large part of the complexity that is the game design of a game as large as Guild Wars 2.

Jon

#83 - Dec. 2, 2013, 12:50 p.m.

I’m on vacation. I think it is today but don’t know when. Be patient.

#108 - Dec. 2, 2013, 7:59 p.m.

I’m not sure how you interpreted my saying clutter is currently ok? There are clearly clutter issues and the point I was making was that this is a place where we would potentially introduce more clutter. Given all of the clutter plus all the added lack of fidelity we would get into knowing an enemies endurance the information gained bang for the technical, UI and design buck is absolutely not worth it. The same could be said about our current effect clutter, but that problem a) already exists b) is harder to solve c) is being worked on and d) doesn’t excuse us making other similar mistakes.

Jon

#109 - Dec. 2, 2013, 8:03 p.m.

Chaith.8256:

Ryan.9387:

Darnis.4056:

Hi Jon!
I’ll have to agree with 5G;
It’s hilarious to talk about Clutter when minionmancers/spiritrangers/Phantasms mesmers see play. PETTING ZOO META!

It would not be clutter if you could only see the endurance bar of one guy that you have targeted. Still I would much rather see Casting bars; or both.

Could just watch and internalize the evade bar.

" He dodged, he dodged again, no more endurance. SPIKE NOW"

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

Yeah this sums up a lot of what I was saying. The more we learn the more we can improve this aspect of the game. It is something we are very aware of but it won’t be solved overnight.