[SUGGESTION] Observation Mode

[Lelila38]

My static recently cleared a11s and an idea came up: wouldn't it be cool, if we could allow our friends/fc members to watch our raid?

Of course we could just stream it, but it would be awesome, if the game gave us the option to show our play to others ingame, without having to stream (especially on PlayStation).
There could be something like party finder, where people can see what others are running at the moment and they could join in "observation mode". There would have to be an option to only let specified people watch, world/server first groups might not want to share their tactics, allow to set a password or maybe require an invitation from someone within the party to be able to watch.
This might also give the people afk'ing in Idyllshire something to do.

I think this would be fun for raids, ex primals and pvp. Letter know what you think about this.

[XiXiQ]

It's an interesting idea, but also it's sort of possible already if you live stream, they can watch you. PS4 does it, I assume windows has an equivalent.

[Lelila38]

This would be different from streaming though. In a stream, you have to watch it from the pov of the person streaming, here you could decide from what angle to look at the fight. Also you could control the camera yourself.

[Niwashi]

Video streaming is really bandwidth intensive. This wouldn't be, since the servers only need to tell us what the players look like, the locations where both players and mobs are, and what actions they're doing. Our own client software would put together the actual images based on that just as it normally does.

And having full camera control while watching a battle would be great. We'd actually be able to get a better view than anybody has now, because the players actually fighting in the battle have their Point-of-View determined by where their character needs to be for the sake of performing their attacks and dealing with mechanics. An observer could choose a POV based purely on where gives them the best view.

[Chocolys]

What you want is basically the Spectator Mode existing in the game already for PvP Custom Matches to be extended to Duty instance. I certainly would love that.

[Rongway]

Streaming is one thing. The viewer can only see what the streamer can see.

Letting spectators view a battle in progress from any angle they like could be abused by people who bring in coaches or spotters to watch for and announce mechanical tells so that the participants don't have to.

[Niwashi]

Letting spectators view a battle in progress from any angle they like could be abused by people who bring in coaches or spotters to watch for and announce mechanical tells so that the participants don't have to.

That's a valid concern in PvP battles, but for PvE dungeons/trials/raids, that sounds more like an added bonus than abuse.

(Somewhat ironic that PvP is the only place we already have spectator mode, but I think that's only for 1x1 matches, so there's probably not much extra in the way of tells that the participant is likely to miss.)