Guild Wars 2

I just want to be very short about this. I have been an epileptic for 15+ years now after I suffered minor brain damage because of trauma and I have fotosensitive epilepsy.

Where:
In the Colossus fractal above lvl 30 (31,32) I’m noticing white flashes during the endboss fight. These flashes are triggering a minor seizure (partial seizure).
This is the only place in the game where I noticed this until now, and my uneducated guess is: This was part of the update, I did quite a few fractal runs before, and never noticed anything like it.

Dangers:
Epilepsy is a common neurological condition found about once every 125-150 people.
Fotosensitive epilepsy is quite rare, less than 1 of every 20 persons with epilepsy suffer from this specific problem, but I find the effects similar to strobes or camera flashes (or lightning). Partial attacks can generalise leading to tonic-clonic attacks or heavier attacks can occur just because of this trigger.

General consequences of seizures:
Memory loss, lowering or loss of consiousness, chance of injury, muscle aches, secondary damages to property and self (due to falling and low consiousness), and in extreme rare cases even death (I do not want to be a kitten, but the chances of SUDEP are probably the same as a precursor drop ingame, which is almost nonexistant.)

Fix: Change the white flashes to something less intrusive which is still well noticable but not dangerous for me and others.

Hope this will help me and others. Also I do not think the game would benifit from this post when the issue is adressed, so I do not mind you closing the thread after measures have been taken. But please do adress the issue.

PaxV

Hi Pax,

I would also be interested to hear if you experience any side effects from the temple of dwayna quests – where there is a lot of ‘strobe/flashing’ all over the screen of flames when battling vs Dwayna.

Pictures of this are available here : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Cathedral-of-Zephyrs-Light-Show/first#post3276612
(This bug has been present for over a year and reported many times to the developers/forums).

I know this issue (strobing/intense flashing) has been found difficult to deal with from players who do not suffer like you do.

Do you have a support ticket raised for the issues you have described ?

Many thanks,

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

I just want to be very short about this. I have been an epileptic for 15+ years now after I suffered minor brain damage because of trauma and I have fotosensitive epilepsy.

Where:
In the Colossus fractal above lvl 30 (31,32) I’m noticing white flashes during the endboss fight. These flashes are triggering a minor seizure (partial seizure).
This is the only place in the game where I noticed this until now, and my uneducated guess is: This was part of the update, I did quite a few fractal runs before, and never noticed anything like it.

Dangers:
Epilepsy is a common neurological condition found about once every 125-150 people.
Fotosensitive epilepsy is quite rare, less than 1 of every 20 persons with epilepsy suffer from this specific problem, but I find the effects similar to strobes or camera flashes (or lightning). Partial attacks can generalise leading to tonic-clonic attacks or heavier attacks can occur just because of this trigger.

General consequences of seizures:
Memory loss, lowering or loss of consiousness, chance of injury, muscle aches, secondary damages to property and self (due to falling and low consiousness), and in extreme rare cases even death (I do not want to be a kitten, but the chances of SUDEP are probably the same as a precursor drop ingame, which is almost nonexistant.)

Fix: Change the white flashes to something less intrusive which is still well noticable but not dangerous for me and others.

Hope this will help me and others. Also I do not think the game would benifit from this post when the issue is adressed, so I do not mind you closing the thread after measures have been taken. But please do adress the issue.

PaxV

Thank you for the warning!

I too have Epilepsy (grand and petite mal seizures) therefore struggle at times with various visual effects in the game so it’s always good to have prior warning so that my son or husband can do that bit for me.

Most games do include an Epilepsy warning somewhere but because I downloaded GW2 I can’t recall seeing one anywhere (but my memory is really bad so that doesn’t mean anything!).

Anyway, would it be possible for there to be an Epilepsy warning somewhere on all current and future content descriptions just to be on the safe side?

P.S. at least people now know why one of my characters is called epigirl and why I play like an idiot most of the time!

Generally stacked melee combat gives me more visial input as well… Certainly at walls or other chokes. But I can work around it, by just zooming out.

Generally for people who do have epilepsy and like to play a game:

- Make sure the Brightness of your screen is not too high, this will lessen the effects of flashes.
- Make sure your room is adequately lit, sometimes it also helps to put a normal lamp
behind your screen, to light up the wall, but I guess it´s also personal preference.
- Make sure you’re fit, being tired makes you more vunerable to seizures.
- If you stress to much your chance of seizures will go up, so relax, it’s just a game.
- Make sure you take some rest every 1-2 hours, it will make your eyes and yourself less tired in the long run.
- If you still have a CRT screen: buy a TFT or LCD screen, older screens used quite low refresh rates with 50 Hz and less not being uncommon. This problem with the old CRT screens has been an acknowledged trigger in the past, but nowadays I know very few people still using those old bulky things.
- Use the highest refresh rate possible (Not the FPS: just the refresh rate of the card/screen, most drivers, screens, videocards do this automatically for you).

-A higher FPS can make your visual input more gradual, but effects will still be there, and it will not be substantially helpfull. So no need to buy better GPUs

Even though these measures will not remove the chance of epilepsy activity, I personally find my reactions to flashes a little more acceptable.

I hope this is of use to others.

@TPMN
Regarding Dwayna (temple event in Malchor’s Leap), I seldom do Dwayna as an event, I prefer balthazar (if it’s done), and melandru. I’ll have a look, I did the event before and I must say I haven’t notcied probelms before.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

@TPMN
Regarding Dwayna (temple event in Malchor’s Leap), I seldom do Dwayna as an event, I prefer balthazar (if it’s done), and melandru. I’ll have a look, I did the event before and I must say I haven’t notcied probelms before.

Ty for the advice on screens/lighting…

As for Dwayna, it’s there, and its in the fight with the priestess. I don’t see it every fight either. The effect is a yellow/orange flashing that tends to clip at the lower end of the screen, filling most of it.

I get the impression (right or wrong) that some visual effect has the decimal place on the scale too far to the right by three or more places.
I’m positive A-Net knows about it, however, whether its a priority or not for fixing is outside what I can know.
//Portable Corpse