Thread: Raid Leader: Raid White-Board

Raid White-Board

I'd love to see this implemented sometime real soon. I lead raids A LOT, and I think every raid leader would love to see this too.

What is the Raid White-Board? It's a small window that pops up with a white image. The Raid-Leader can toggle it on/off by right clicking his portrait and going under RAID > White Board. Only the Raid Leader can toggle it on/off. The Raid Leader can use his cursor and hold the left mouse button down to draw red lines. This will allow you to draw objectives, flanks, etc. Very useful in raid leading for both PvE and PvP! Generals and Commanders do this on maps in a room to plan battles in private.

Finally you can give your Raid Members a visual of what you want to do. Often there is confusion when you try to explain where everyone is to go! Well, not anymore.

So there you have it. The image won't be very big intentionally so that it doesn't take up your whole screen, and so that a smaller amount of information is required to be on the server.

The biggest issue is performance. The entire white board has to be uploaded as a picture and stored on the server. The entire white board has to shipped to all the raid members. The intention of the game design is to minimize the bandwidth utilization between the clients and the servers. That why all the textures are stored on our disk.

Many people, me included have playability issues in raids. Problems with low frame rates, sluggish game play, freezes. I can't speak for any one else. The last thing I want is some jerk putting up and taking down a vision inhibitor whenever they feel like it. Causing all kinds of problem for me.

I would go into my options. Check the box - disable download and display of the white board. Or if there was no option, the raid leader insisted on doing it. I would leave the group.

I can't stand people screwing with what I am seeing. In a similar vien, there is a lot people that don't like forced emotes. The concept of a forced emote is someone like the Bunny seizing control of your character for a moment. A white board to me is a lot more intrusive because someone is seizing control of large portion of my display and overwritting it without my permission and at time of their choosing.

We waiting for someone. The raid leader is bored. We start getting on, off, on, off from the raid leader. I doubt it going to be long before someone blows a fuse. I can imagine a leader writing hate speech, racial slurs ... on the white board. Turbine would have to develop tooling for Customer Service to deal with the CoC and harrassement complaints.

Conceptually pictures especially when not everybody is in voice is a nice feature. I am not convinced that it is workable idea giving the bandwidth and abuse potential. Sadly if there is a way to abuse a feature in an online game, people will abuse it.

If I recall correctly (it's been a while), Guild Wars allowed players to draw on the minimap to indicate routing, circle target priorities, etc. It didn't block anything else on the screen, but it was helpful for people who are more visually minded to better understand what the leader meant. Their minimaps worked a little differently than ours, but maybe something like that would be a workable alternative?

Interesting idea though, if there were a way to implement something that didn't interfere with performance and allow the type of griefing issues that Yula described. I'm one of those who tends to understand things best when I see them drawn out rather than hearing a verbal description.

Yeah, I really like games that let you draw on the map (or "ping" a location) - even if it's just temporary and fades after a little white.

An in-game tool would be nice, but I think your best bet is to use one of the various apps. Google "online collaborative drawing tool", and you find a bunch. Most of them let you save the drawings, which are nice for posting in your kin's forums.

Here's some we did way back...

You can call these up while you are playing the game either via the in game browser. Or if you are like me. Tab to Firefox look at the diagram. I can still hear voice chat while looking and asking questions like. It shows Main Tank (MT). Which Guardian or Warden is going to be the MT?

That's how I do it too Yula, but it's nice to use a collaborative app that you can interactively edit, and everyone can see it.

An in-game way of doing that would be amazing. So I certainly support this idea, but I must admit, there are many other things I'd rather see before this (since I have a reasonable work-around for this).

Originally Posted by Beleg

An in-game way of doing that would be amazing. So I certainly support this idea, but I must admit, there are many other things I'd rather see before this (since I have a reasonable work-around for this).

You have a reasonable "work-around" for this?