Nothing kills the spectacle of a massive battle faster than a sea of nameplates, or excessive use of flashy VFX. Both of these are pretty unintrusive in most games, but when you're dealing with an MMO with large-scale raids and literal siege battles, it might be wise to be sparing with both UI and visual effects.
There are several approaches to deal with nameplate clutter, but here's a couple unrelated ideas off the top of my head:
- Full names only show on party members and friends.
- Distant nameplates collapse into dots. Very distant nameplates don't show at all.
- Names remain collapsed until you point your cursor at a player.
- Options to scale nameplates. This could also help readability for some monitor setups.
For VFX, the solution is pretty simple; be conservative. A giant blast of magic should have some fancy glowing particles, but a sword swing should not. If you need to accentuate animations, there's plenty of options besides big eye-catching neon streaks. Blood, geometry smears, motion blur, air distortion, sparks, etc.
TL;DR - Make nameplates hideable and keep flashy particle effects to where they make sense. Otherwise huge battles tend to look ugly.
