Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Accessibility and Netherspite

Can't. Resist. Urge. To. Think. About. WoW.

What can I say? You gotta babystep into these good-corporate-citizen-knows-a-job-aint-nuttin-but-work binges.

I accidentally opened up my google reader and stumbled across a gem of an article by the Serial Ganker describing Warhamer Online from the perspective of a WoW player.

Kinda neat description that would have any WoW player who is on the fence with hating on grindy grinds, stupid class composition and balance issues in raids, and a whole host of other things thinking.

Buried in there somewhere he mentions being colorblind, and thus very frustrated with the Netherspite fight in Karazhan.

I never thouhgt of it from that perspective.

The fight is largely undoable if you cannot differentiate between the colored beams.

Kinda makes me think they should make the red beam lasoo shaped, like the damn lasoos (sp?) you wrangle rays with for the Shatari Sky Guard. I grew to despise that quest, because my pet would continuously kill the damn ray while I was in the process of lasoo'ing. So I dont do it anymore. Because, as a wise man said, it's my 15 bucks, I'll do what I want with it, lol.

And maybe make Netherspite's green beam with sharp, pointed zig zags? And keep the blue one nice and smooth, just for good measure.

Would add a bit of Accessibility to the software, yes?

Edit: firefox's spell checker correctly informed me that the way to spell it is lasso, unless you're a jackass. I am a jackass and like the way lasoo looks better.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is a very good point, I'm sure they could do something to make it a bit easier for those that are colour blind!

One solution (since I'm sure Blizzard won't do anything about it) could be to have someone call out the location of whatever colour the person should be tanking (i.e. South). It's not perfect, but it could at least help out! Although I'm sure they've already come up with something similar. :)

Anonymous said...

I am the RL in our Kara runs, take the full duration blue beam with my Lock every second phase, and am also color blind.

My guild mates know this, love to rib me about it but it has never been an issue. I have one of the other raiders I trust assigned before we start the fight to call out the position of the beams as they spawn. I then tend to call each Toon to the beam they should be on that phase. A bit unnecessary I guess and it’s mainly to cement in my mind where the beams are but we never get a crossed beam nor someone forgetting where to be, or any problems if we’ve had to pug someone in that day.

There is the occasional time where I am a touch slow and everyone is in position, tapping their feet waiting for me to jump into that blue beam. Then it provides a perfect excuse to my dawdling.