Yes, this is a 'what if?' type post.

In the xpac, the dungeon cap for max level raid zones is 25, however the max raid size is presumably still 40 (because of the existence of unchanged lvl 60 raid dungeons). Among other things, this means you can keep your standby players in the same raid as your actual raiders - making tracking standby a lot easier.

What if those standby folk could enable 'spectator mode' on another raid member. Doing so would synchronize your viewport with theirs. This would enable a standby player to watch the encounter from outside the dungeon without interferring (except the obvious relevant input on vent or the raid channel).

I could see this being useful for a number of things:
-Standby players would have an alternative to simply standing around bored or grinding something random while they're not in the dungeon.
-Guilds with large rosters often have trouble with new players having to learn the encounter for quite a while after the encounter is actually beaten. Watching the learning encounters over someone's shoulder might allow raids to get their standby players some experience with the encounter even if there is no space for them.
-Debugging your raid - if there is a particularly difficult job that is blocking winning the encounter, you could have a few folk watch the player and offer different insights as to what might be going wrong.

Granted, you can get a lot of this benefit by using Fraps, however this approach would be more immediate. The only real problem I can see is the tendancy for some folk to be backseat-drivers - and there's always the mute button in vent for that :)

Having the spectator mode only operate within the raid prevents 'spying' - you have control over who you invite. And having it lock to the viewport of another player prevents exploitation in that even though the player is not physically present, they're still bound by the limits of what a real player in the dungeon can see or get to because they're locked to a player who is physically in the dungeon.

If you had such a tool, would you use it? Regularly, I mean - not just as a once off novelty thing.

Yup.

God knows how useful that is when you're waiting for a slot in a FPS and start hopping through the other players view to identify the campers and their favourite spots >_>

The technology is obviously there, after all, it's mind vision with a few perks added.

Would really make the learning process way easier for green recruits.

Would be awesome for sure, you could even just invite friends or random people who could see endgame just for fun, instead of having to rely on videos with crappy UIs and no sense whatsoever of mouselook coordination. Would also let some people actually shoot videos with any kind of PoV without having to worry about the fight for those people who would still want to see videos. And obviously, working on strats and learning new encounters would be easier if you didn't have to relearn every fight for 2-3days in a row if you're part of a "big" guild.

Definitely a good idea. After dying in an arena you can enter spectator mode, where you're basically a wisp running around watching the others fight. I can imagine this sort of thing wouldn't be too difficult to implement in raid instances. Any bandwidth concerns or performance issues could be solved by making sure nobody (whether they be normal raiders or the other spectators) can see spectators.

That sounds cool, but as a healer, the thing I hate most is when there's someone in the raid who's not currently in the dungeon. I instinctively try to heal/buff them, only to be greeted with the "not in range" error message. I know there are mods that grey out your raid boxes when the character is out of range, but it's still annoying.

I guess this is more of a UI problem that can be solved by mods.

I'd be interested in the amount of PvE moviemaking potential this has... multiple view angles not limited by positioning requirements of the fights, for example.

All they'd need to do is increase the cap back to the original 40, so it takes a bit more bandwidth? Not much of a problem, it's not as much as the actual 40 being there themselves. As 15 of them are just watching the others.

This idea is VERY good, especially when your core 25 have learnt a boss encounter and some players are finding it hard to grasp. I'd love the ability to change who I was watching at the time, or even maybe have a split screen? Viewing more than one person at once, I remember that sort of thing in the game Commandos, so you could see a few aspects of your raid.

Question is, what would it show? Your UI around them, or who they are targetting, and what they are casting / attacking with? Or would it just look like when we all press Alt+Z and be blank? I'm thinking the 2nd, so that we could see what heals people use etc.

About that last point - healing, this will help alot of new healers as well learn what tricks other healers use, what ranks, and so on.

Casting bars, target, buffs and debuffs. That would be the important information besides movement/location.

Casting bars and spell information would be nice to have, but I don't really think its all that necessary. Just having it work exactly like mindvision would be a really great start. Your default UI around a view of the targetted player.

And yeah, I think this would be a great feature to add, though it might add some strain on instance servers, which I think Blizzard are trying to minimize. :(

I think this is totally needed... but more from the standpoint of PvP, not PvE.

- Learning a fight by viewing through someone's eyes is nice to have... but can be duplicated through the use of videos

Blizzard is trying to put a new polish on their PvP systems - why not put the "Arena" into Arena battles. For lots of competitive games (FPS etc.) there've been mods to allow people to spectate matches. Since there are going to be Arena Seasons, there'd likely be a huge demand for spectating the top performing teams. I'd guess there's probably no better way to promote Arena PvP than to allow spectators.

I fully agree, but spectating WoW pvp isn't the easiest thing to do, unless you watch it from someone's point of view and see exactly what they see (casting bars, targetting, their camera rotation, etc...).

Another option would be to allow general spectators that have a CS-style camera (free-look, locked, etc..) with some information (at least health/mana bars of players on both teams). I hate cycling through people in arena (STV or DM from my experience) for anything other than a 1v1 to see how much life/mana they have left.

Even if it's limited to a "Battlegroup match of the Week", it'd be pretty nice. Freelook with health/mana bars over people's heads would be good enuff to start - no need to get more complex than that. If player XYZ wants to release their own video showing casting time, etc. that'd be their perogative.

At the start of Arena competition, no one will know who the top teams are. But by the time season 2 rolls around, there'll be lots of attention. If Blizzard is truly serious about PvP, they'd be dedicating GM/CM support to building a thriving league system

My guess: doing this would also probably involve server gymnastics that would make existing lag issues pale in comparison. =/

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To bring this back to the OP's post: being in a large guild where there are many people for few raid spots, is it fair to expect people to spend their time vicariously living the raiding experience? Or would your members rather level up an alt/engage in forthcoming epic Tonk battles?






PS: It'd also help PvP if Blizzard implemented some forum support for Battlegroups as well... =) But that's a definite side topic to this thread.

I think it is, in the case of arenas anyway. Put about 5 NPCs at various locations in the stands to watch Arena bouts. When someone enters spectator mode, they are automatically given a Mind Vision buff that allows them to see through one of the random NPCs. They cannot cancel this debuff and it is removed when the arena match ends. Now, I don't know how well Blizzard's servers could handle this, but it would be a very easy way for people to watch arena bouts.

I was more referring to the fact that its hard to tell whats going on by just looking at the field. I've watched a few 5v5s and 2v2s and like I said its annoying to have to cycle through everyone and continuously press f to find out whos about to die.

They could add some sort of party bars so you could see the HP/Mana/Debuffs and the castingbars for both teams...

PvP: Most simple solution imo would be to make the Name Plates bars appear at full range for spectators, they already have those built in. Name plates are enough to tell what's going on, mana on it would be good too, but you could live without telling who has mana just from looking, since most likely by the time people run out of mana, there will be less than 6standing, and you can just click them.
As for watching videos instead, the problem is, even tho it's true you can watch some stuff from a video, there's a lot to consider. Unless you can get the 5persons PoV, you'll miss a lot of the action, like what the healer is doing when you're watching a rogue tear apart people.

In PvE, the other issue as I said is terrible UI settings where you can't see a thing, and people who are usually not worried about face requirement in case of healing or camera distance in case of melees, which results in looking at pretty horrible videos. You can see strats, but it feels pretty annoying and dull, and in some cases it's even worse than that. Being able to ssee the stuff for yourself, with your own UI and your own PoV would really be great.

I could see real time PvP speciation being highly exploitable, but I don't think I'm the only person who would enjoy a match record feature. Having a feature so that as soon as a match finishes it plays for everyone currently engaged in spectator mode would be the only practical way to enable PvP viewing I think.

7 second delay?

I do remember the Tribes 2 shoutcasting team, and how much fun it was once they got the live cast of their viewpoint going - but even recording the caster's POV (Tribes2 had a built in 'demo' record function, which could be played back and accurately generate an entire match) and running it simultaneously with the shoutcast was a lot of fun.

Plus, it was really pretty cool to hear your name (handle) being called by the shoutcasters, if your team was good enough to rate a cast.

Prevent communication similar to when someone is flying on a mount. I suppose people could use ventrillo, though. I wouldn't have a way around that.

For a PvP spectator mode you could copy guild war's obs mode verbatim and it would be solid. In GW games aren't shown in real time. The top guild matchs are up, and you can review your own matches. If WoW's could be done out of realtime it would open up the option to see what the top teams on other BGs are doing.

Also if you are able to record this "spectator" data, you might be able to save "replays". Then you would be able to re-live moments for example from top team pvp matches etc.

If one took the spectator to the next level, one could maybe also allow people from all servers to spectate special pvp tournaments (cpl?) etc etc.

recording demo's would make the demo files to big, recording 20 people in a BG or 25 in a raid is just too much information going back and forth, demo's are just a recording of all incoming and outcoming server information from and to the player that records it, and people are already lagging themselves when actually being in a raid envoirement.

This is the reason I think spectating is impossible, in FPS' you had HLTV or GTV (hl and q3) and basically they recorded a demo, and broadcasted that with a 30 seconds delay, but doing this in blizzard's server would create too much bandwidth. So the only sollution is a sort of GTV where 1 person broadcasts the match, and other people tune in at that person, so the wow servers don't get extra load. But then again, blizzard would not create something like this for wow.