Guild Wars 2

why not have some signal (sound or icons show when you are threaten buy a enemy incoming aoe aka “red circle”)

pluzoid.2597:

Red circles are hard to see when there’s a lot of action going on as it is, not just for colour blind people!

The problem is that they’re rendered additively, and in some places the floor is almost white (ex., last boss in AC story mode comes to mind). This means the circle isn’t actually visible, regardless of player vision. The solution here would be to render the circle using a different compositing method. It might not look as “pretty”, but would fix the ~10% of cases where additive rendering is invisible.

In other places (ex., harpy platforms in Fractals of the Mists), the circle can be larger than the piece of “ground” (i.e., bigger than the platform), which means it doesn’t render at all (since only the actual circumference is rendered). The solution here would be to either fill the circle (so the platform turns red), make it smaller (so it always fits inside a platform, or draw it on a virtual plane, so the circumference is visible on the air surrounding the platform.

There has not been much if anything mentioned from anet in the past few months about adding a colorblind mode to the game. This game has been out for quite some time now and there have been countless threads asking for some sort of update or at least an acknowledgement that anet cares about this issue with their game. As it stands right now those of us who are colorblind have difficulty enjoying a major part of the game and at times the game can even become unplayable. It would be great to hear something about this issue as it just seems to have been ignored by anet altogether.

circle line should be bigger,so it would be easier to notice.

I’m not colorblind but I totally support a colorblind mode. It should be a top priority for anet to make their game accessible to everyone, especially when it would be a fairly easy change. I’ve seen several of these threads since the game launched, why won’t devs comment on this?

Women can carry the color-blind genes, but they are not affected by it, for whatever reason. I wonder if they really could change the circle color and would it be any good for all areas? Any color that contains red or green shades appear gray or black, such as Purple and Pink. (I had a color-blind teacher in high school and we loved screwing with him.)

Transcend.4957:

A solution to warning circles for colorblind players would really help a lot of people- about 1/6 of males are colorblind (and a much smaller number of women).

I certainly have a lot of trouble seeing the red circles- in some situations they are entirely invisible to me. One player I met had been in the game a month without even realising there were warning circles!

I would love the ability to change the UI colors and most importantly the red circles. I have a great difficulty seeing them.

i support a colorblind mode too.
i am not colorblind and i would never have thought about people having problems with the red circles.
but to imagine pink or purple circles is just strange, white circles wouldn’t fit
so yellow would be my suggestion but yellow is closer to green again….

Really the best solution is just to let people pick their color for the circles.

I’m not color blind, but I am blind in one eye and have poor vision in the other. A feature like this would help me a lot, too. My bad vision means that, on certain ground textures, the red circles are impossible for me to see. It also means I can’t see the target circle sometimes – not quite as bad on my main Engineer, but a death sentence on my thief. If I had the option to change the color, I could make them bright glowing green when I’m going to be going into a dark or red-toned place, like AC or the lava fractal for example, then change it to dark purple when I’m going to be in the bright, snowy shiverpeaks. Being able to change cursor and various other effect colors would also help me. As it is, a lot of things just don’t stand out well enough for me to see. The only colors I have trouble with are shades of blue, it would be really nice if I could change nameplate colors. The colors used for general players and for players in your group look very, very similar to me also, in some environments I can’t tell them apart unless I practically press my face against the monitor and squint. I know one is teal and one is blue but they just look very similar to my eyes at that size. Being able to enlarge names of players/npcs would likely help, too.

Also, being able to adjust brightness/gamma in windowed mode would help a lot. I have to play windowed so I can check wiki and youtube and receive messages from an IM program, but the game windowed is so dark to my eyes, even with my monitor at full brightness, that I just wind up stumbling around blindly in the darkness half the time. I have to wear the Mad Memoires: Complete Edition to see in many areas, in fact, without falling to my death. Since I can’t afford fine transmutation stones at this time, this locks me in to wearing a green backpiece on a level 80 character. I would just carry a torch, but Engineers can’t use them.

By the way. those new loot chests are just awful, I can barely see the things and I have a feeling I’ve missed a huge amount of them on dark backgrounds. It would help if they flashed, or were bright colors, or alternated colors, or you know.. didn’t exist.

Anet, please be considerate of your color blind and visually impaired players. These are not huge, game-altering changes.I am not asking you to make the game accessable to fully blind people, no one is – I think even blind people realize that isn’t at all possible. These changes will not inconvenience your “normal” players. It will just make it easier on those of us who are disadvantaged to be able to enjoy your game like everyone else.

Frankly, I’m amazed that these options don’t exist. At least the personal story cut scenes are fully captioned for any deaf people who might be playing, but even then, they aren’t properly supported either. Right now, when I do anything besides PvE, I have to do it with a group of friends. So they can tell me to dodge or direct me around in areas too dark for me to see. I rely on them entirely, and I wouldn’t if I could just crank the brightness and change effect colors. I have to play in windowed mode to receive messages about my job, I work online.

Right now, the game just is not accomodating for people who are disadvantaged, handicapped, disabled – whatever name you prefer. Color blindness, deafness, or moderately impared vision, it doesn’t matter. You’d better not be disabled or handicapped in any way if you want to do well in this game. Unfortunately it’s not something you can just “suck up” and ignore. I’m begging here. I’m not a bad player when I can actually see.

Sorry for writing a novella here, but I had to get all of that off my chest. It’s frustrating.

This is funny seeing this thread actually because just today I got a email from Dark Vale Games (They created Forge) with patch notes mentioning color blind gaming modes. Pretty impressive since the game released in December and they are a fairly small team.

Surprised this still hasn’t been updated into GW2 yet.

Maybe as more games add this on, GW2 will follow suit.

promurphy.2761:

Maybe as more games add this on, GW2 will follow suit.

Hopefully so. I’m not color blind but seems slightly discriminatory without adding an option for this.

I’m still crossing my fingers for a color blind mode aswell as I’m red/green color blind. Makes things quite difficult sometimes. Thankfuly though people that I group up with understand and aren’t jerks about it when I go down from not seeing those blasted circles that seem to hide from me from time to time. xD

Please do something about this anet… It is ruining the wonderful gaming experience for me. I also have 3 family members/friends who are deciding not to purchase the game due to this oversight.

promurphy.2761:

Really the best solution is just to let people pick their color for the circles.

It is, that way people who want to customize their UI, the colorblind folk, and the ones who like the color just as it is, both benefit from it. It doesn’t have to be all spectacular or complex, just a list of the basic colors (Blue, Red, Yellow, Black, White, etc.)

This thread dead? I feel like the only way to make this request have legs is if we continue to talk about it.

I guess even the players without that problem would like to have that…
in some areas the floor is so red that it is hard to see the circles (when you are not searching for them)
(e.g. when you attack with ranged weapons and try to place some aoe it could happen that you ignore the circle around your character
fotm, grawls, lava, boss – blue, purple, yellow, … would be much better in that area, green brings to problems (color blind people would not like it and green = good stuff – e.g. when you place your aoes))

+1 for yellow circles instead of red, died so many times due to colour-blindness and these red circles

Not sure how color blindness works, but most video drivers have an option to adjust color balance. You should in theory be able to adjust it so that everything in the red spectrum shows up as a different color instead, and this would be a one-time fix for every game or application that you use. Since I’m not color blind myself I have no idea if this negatively impacts the color of other objects, but even so I think it’s worth trying as a stopgap fix in the meantime. In general though, color blindness is a computing problem not just one that affects specific video games. You will probably find better solutions that are designed for all-purpose color blind computing rather than trying to get color blind support patches out of specific video games.

Leablo.2651:

Not sure how color blindness works, but most video drivers have an option to adjust color balance. You should in theory be able to adjust it so that everything in the red spectrum shows up as a different color instead, and this would be a one-time fix for every game or application that you use. Since I’m not color blind myself I have no idea if this negatively impacts the color of other objects, but even so I think it’s worth trying as a stopgap fix in the meantime. In general though, color blindness is a computing problem not just one that affects specific video games. You will probably find better solutions that are designed for all-purpose color blind computing rather than trying to get color blind support patches out of specific video games.

If you don’t know how it affects us please don’t go giving solutions before doing any research into the condition. Your “fix” would cause more issues as we still detect the color just do not differentiate it from other colors (in the case or red it would be green). so we could put the game into only blue/yellow by shifting the red/green (blue/yellow deficient can do the opposite) and now it looks like trash. The point is that the game colors should be close to what we see everyday. If I’m walking in the grass the red circle isn’t going to stand out on green, but yellow sure will. Yes we can use a texture editor but then e get into a grey area with what would be seen as giving an advantage. the devs need to give a clear answer on the editor situation or just add support for a large number of players…

Maybe if I wrote a sob story about how it makes adopted kids feel they’d act as quickly as they did with the wording in the human story intro. Though I still don’t expect anything since tehy probably think it would make it too “confusing” for the idiot players who wouldn’t be able to figure out how to turn their personal story prompts on and off.

Yes +1 wanna see me paint ball red vs green ! im always surrounded!

WoW has a color blind mode option to make it easier for gamers, so implementing something similar here should be relatively simple, and make it more accessible to a wider player base.

I am red/green colour blind myself and the red circle problem is indeed extremely annoying. On a dark background they are practically invisible for me.

Pleeeease give us a colour blind option, ArenaNet!

/signed (not colorblind myself, but havin a friend who is… )

/signed I have always been astounded that a workaround for colour-blind players wasn’t present from launch.

One criticism that can fairly be levelled at Arenanet is that you lot are far too slow to respond to player concerns, and your communication is very, very poor. Bugs, bots, suggestions, whatever; we never hear anything here from the team. Why do you not respond? Occasionally, you shove a link up on the login page – that really isn’t good enough.

Look how long it took you to fix the cabbage patch door in the Harathi Hinterlands – 6 months! A simple fix, surely? Then there’s this thread, opened 4 months ago. Results – nil; response – nil. I am a programmer by trade; there is a very simple, very obvious fix for this – allow players an option to define portions of their environment. You obviously have flags / fields / however you label them that govern the appearance of the circles. How difficult is it to add a player defined option to control the colour? Not very.

According to Wiki, “In individuals of Northern European ancestry, as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women experience the common form of red-green color blindness.” A small proportion, perhaps, but in a game with a playerbase as large as GW2, that is an awful lot of players who are afflicted by an easily resovable, near game-breaking problem. No fix, no communication – no good enough, Anet.

I am also not colour blind. I also wish to see this problem resolved, so that everyone can play this game on an equal basis.

/signed

EVERYONE has the right to play.

Red/green colorblindness is not the only kind. Fixing for one might leave another out in the cold, so to speak.

I would think that Anet would want to accomodate as many players as possible. Fixing something like this should be as automatic as fixing an exploit.

Even a fix like a toggle for “What color would you like your ground effects to be” would be acceptable.

Cheers from the Old Lady!

Ashabhi.1365:

/signed

EVERYONE has the right to play.

Red/green colorblindness is not the only kind. Fixing for one might leave another out in the cold, so to speak.

I would think that Anet would want to accomodate as many players as possible. Fixing something like this should be as automatic as fixing an exploit.

Even a fix like a toggle for “What color would you like your ground effects to be” would be acceptable.

Cheers from the Old Lady!

Or you put blue AOEs and everyone’s happy.

As someone suffering from protanopia, I vote for this thread.

I would suggest simply putting a dark outline around the red circles, making them easier to see for everyone (colorblind included). Also, perhaps a cross down the middle would help us see the circles when they appear on tiny platforms (Hello again Fractal harpies! We meet again!).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I would suggest simply putting a dark outline around the red circles, making them easier to see for everyone (colorblind included). Also, perhaps a cross down the middle would help us see the circles when they appear on tiny platforms (Hello again Fractal harpies! We meet again!).

Actually, a darker outline would not help the red/green colour blind (speaking as one of them). Like the OP said, the shade of red they currently use is very hard to see on dark surfaces. On light surfaces however it is usually not that hard, snow being the easiest.

But I am thinking, that maybe a lighter outline would indeed help. My own preferred solution would be, if we could chose the colour as well, which doesn’t sound that hard to implement (from my theorist’s persective, that is).

So… How do you get on with playing cards?

Being colorblind has been an issue since day one for me :-(

Wish they could add support for all of us

I’d like to see enemy AoE’s highlighted in the method shown in recent promotional material detailing the combat in Wildstar.

While I do agree that it would be nice (and wise) for ANet to add more options for disabled users to play with less difficulty, I don’t think changing the circles for everyone is the answer- the circles that appear are designed to be difficult, the game’s hard sometimes! Sometimes you don’t see a trap and you walk in and then see the circle and realize “oh shoot!” but it’s too late. That’s the game! Making it easier to spot these circles (by doing a double line or changing it to bright yellow) would make the traps almost pointless. As for an easier to see cast radius, this is an option that many people (myself included) elect to turn off entirely in exchange for a much faster and simpler auto cast where the pointer is on the screen. IMHO seeing those circles is unnecessary for ANet to put time into fixing.

Adding a feature for color blind users to utilize I fully +1 but PLEASE don’t change the game for everyone.

melchapp.5917:

While I do agree that it would be nice (and wise) for ANet to add more options for disabled users to play with less difficulty, I don’t think changing the circles for everyone is the answer- the circles that appear are designed to be difficult, the game’s hard sometimes! Sometimes you don’t see a trap and you walk in and then see the circle and realize “oh shoot!” but it’s too late. That’s the game! Making it easier to spot these circles (by doing a double line or changing it to bright yellow) would make the traps almost pointless. As for an easier to see cast radius, this is an option that many people (myself included) elect to turn off entirely in exchange for a much faster and simpler auto cast where the pointer is on the screen. IMHO seeing those circles is unnecessary for ANet to put time into fixing.

Adding a feature for color blind users to utilize I fully +1 but PLEASE don’t change the game for everyone.

That’s not challenge, that’s a purposeful UI flaw.

dear arenanet,

why didn’t happen anything the last 5 months?
like readwulf said….there should be a comment or anything from your side on that issue!

i’m signing that way as a non-colorblind, because there should be a solution, for everyone to completly enjoy the world of GW2 and have fun…..also in dungeons, where the red circles seem to come from sometimes.

Haven’t read all posts, maybe someone already suggested:
I know on League of Legend they have in the option a colour blind mode, which make the whole game switched into colour blind-colour.

Please let us select the color of the “red” circles. Guild Rush missions are senseless without.

+100000000000000000000… wth ANet get on the ball here. I don’t know what happened in recent patches, but now the red circles are completely invisible to me. I used to be able to see them vaguely, now I can’t see anything at all. I’m having to rely on Guildies to tell me when to dodge over TS and even that has it’s own issues as to the time between giving and receiving. SE during the mesmer fight, is a waste of time on any character but my Guardian who can survive that hit. For God’s sake, fix it!

+1. I’m not colorblind but I really feel that accessibility is a very important aspect of games, especially ones in today’s day and age.

Very surprised ANet hasn’t implemented this. What is taking them so long?

Just want to throw my support in here. I am playing again after a long hiatus, just passed level 60 on my way to max level. I made my first gem purchase last week, and plan to once a month as long as I keep playing. However, it is getting increasingly more frustrating not being able to see the red circles and play effectively. Being able to play the game well relies on ability to make quick decisions and react — if I cannot see what I need to react to, then I am not fully experiencing the game or having a chance to play it well. If the game continues to frustrate me at 80 while participating in guild/endgame activities, I’m not sure I can continue to play. Just wanted to give a hard example.

Accessibility is an important trend that several gaming companies are buying into, and I hope Arena Net does so soon. Thanks.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-this-new/first#post2109093
Does this change help anyone here? Just curious.

Geotherma.2395:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-this-new/first#post2109093
Does this change help anyone here? Just curious.

probably not since the color is still the same. I’m not colorblind myself but red/green colorblindness means red looks very much like a dark green, so in dark areas, on green floor etc the cricles are very hard to notice.
On a side note, the general color scheme of red for enemies and green for allies should also be included in this consideration.

I play with a few colorblind people, and while the color isn’t any better, they told me that the animation ANet added to the new circles really helps make them more visible.

The new update helped me a very, very small amount. Yes it made it more noticeable, but no where near enough. I am just guessing on if I need to dodge something or just following others dodge. Sometimes I will just die and not know why because of it. It really affects the game play massively, especially on fights like Lupicus when I get 2 shot because I couldn’t see where to dodge.

I suggest giving the players their own ability to change the colors of friendly and enemy circles. They give us a spectrum to work with and we change the colors according to what we can see. For example, I could make an enemies circle blue. It would help greatly and I’ll finally be able to not get my kitten kicked in dungeons. I’m really tired of getting, in a way, “held back” because I’m colorblind.

I’ve already quit the game because of this issue, but came back because my friends really wanted me too and because of the changes. However, I am still at a huge disadvantage and once I get frustrated to the max I will leave the game either until something to add me comes out or forever. I just can’t deal with a skill based game not being fully accessible to everyone.