The world feels so different when you turn off display names!

[Tanama]

But like mentioned above, i love waving to people I know as well so for me it is rarely used.

If you play with no names displayed long enough, you'll pick up the ability to recognize other players by their customized faces, hairstyles, hair and eye colors etc. provided they aren't heavily armored.

[Arkghyom]

It's so pretty!

[Grey_Cain]

If you play with no names displayed long enough, you'll pick up the ability to recognize other players by their customized faces, hairstyles, hair and eye colors etc. provided they aren't heavily armored.

It would certainly have helped me recognize the melee we had swapped into our party in CT yesterday. Without a name tag (don't know why it wasn't showing), she was basically invisible to me, even when just standing alone beside Atomos.

[Ronove]

If you play with no names displayed long enough, you'll pick up the ability to recognize other players by their customized faces, hairstyles, hair and eye colors etc. provided they aren't heavily armored.

Even when heavily armored, I can still recognize my tank friend just because of the colors he uses!

But yeah having names off, I can recognize people fairly better because I learned to check for that first. It's actually a lot more fun I think. Having names off is really nice though. The screen isn't cluttered at all and it feels more immersive. The only time I have names on is for people in my Party/Alliance but that's because that's for function. I always highly recommend it to my FC mates but everyone thinks I'm weird, haha.

[Raikki]

Adding to this, I've started using a macro that hides most of my UI but leaves the essential stuff up like chat. I also have it hide all my hotbars and then show a normally-hidden bar (set to minimum scale size) that only contains 1 button which executes the inverse macro that displays everything again. If anyone wants to try it, the relevant text commands are: /hud [element] [on/off] and /hotbar display [number] [on/off]. Here's the list of HUD element names from the play guide:

Target Bar (TargetBar,tbar), Focus Target Bar (FocusTarget,ftarget)
Party List (PartyList,plist), Enemy List (EnemyList,elist)
Parameter Bar (ParamBar,param), Minimap (Minimap,mmap)
Main Menu (MainMenu,mmenu), Server Info (ServerInfo,server)
Gil (Gil,gil), Inventory Grid (InventoryGrid,igrid)
Duty List (DutyList,dlist), Item Help (ItemHelp,ihelp)
Action Help (ActionHelp,ahelp), LimitGauge (LimitGauge,lgauge)
Experience Bar (ExpBar,ebar), Status Effects (StatusEffects,sfx)

[Linadae]

I leave the npc names on just so I know who to talk to but I ended up having to remove player names. Too many miss clicks in the big fates and things got really jumbled in the popular areas. I do miss being able to emote at people though.

[Rufalus]

Turning off names was one of the first things I did in the game, I don't want a screen full of text. In adddition to removing UI elements you can also resize them in the hud settings, cycling between four different sizes. You can make things very small. But only with the UI off entirely can you see the true beauty of the game.