Ableism and accessibility

General Discussion
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The thing is, and I can’t stress this enough, the skilled options, when played with skill, do in fact reward players more than ‘low skill’ options. Moiras TTK, for example, is much higher than other supports, since she cannot headshot and has the lowest damage in the game. That’s how you balance those characters- by making sure that low aim requirements don’t have higher base damage, etc.

Old symm was broadly considered a throw pick, seeing how easily counterable she was.

OP and other disabled individuals aren’t asking that they get a moira with a 1 sec ttk (like the failed rework had if you got in close orb range). They’re simply asking that characters with low aim requirement don’t get dumpstered or made unnecessarily hard for other players. Think about the low aim heroes in OW- how many of them get targeted for “higher skill” reworks, oftentimes when they’re not even considered that good.

They’re also asking that people stop referring to characters that aren’t as mechanically demanding as “braindead,” seeing as they have skills that differentiate. If they’re not your cup of tea, you don’t have to play them! But stop trying to remove them from the game.

Ana is still support queen, and if people would quit crying abt IF, Baptiste is factually a bit harder to land his heals with especially at distance.

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113

Bro are you stupid? They’re saying “people who get mad that Moira is a ‘no skill’ character and want her gone/nerfed/etc alienates a whole part of the playerbase”, basically. This isn’t about ranked viability, this is about making characters FINE to play at ANY level- specifically keeping them ok to play in Arcade and Quickplay.

“We need to make the game super easy” how is adding captions making it “super easy”? You can opt out of those. People with deafness, audio processing disorders (like me), and the like benefit from captions because it puts US at THE SAME LEVEL as people who can play perfectly fine without them.

All players have some skill, whether you think “being able to click heads on Widow” is the only skill that matters. You don’t know this person’s playstyle on the characters they’re GOOD at, and are just assuming that anything that isn’t the norm isn’t skill. Skill is gamesense, tracking, positioning, ult usage, etc etc. Not just raw mechanical aiming power.

Making characters for ALL types of players ISN’T “not taking itself seriously”, it’s taking itself MORE seriously than other FPS games because they’re making it accessible to everyone, whether they want to play ranked, quickplay, or arcade.

And as I mentioned earlier, captions are not an advantage unless people who can hear JUST FINE use them and use it to THEIR advantage. It only picks up sounds that are in the immediate area/in your character’s hearing range, so you have a chance to FIND them- if it gave noise from across the entire map, it’d be confusing. It doesn’t give away enemy team comms. And you can specify it to be for specific noises (such as ult queues, important ability/sound queues, or even all pre-game communication). That’s like saying the icons above peoples’ heads when they use the communication wheel are an advantage because you can see that pop up before you hear them.

Even if it’s just ignorance, you’re feeding into the exact ableism op is talking about. “Don’t play a skill-based game if you have no mechanical skill” aka “don’t play my game if you can’t play it like everyone else”.

They aren’t asking for “”"“no skill”""" heroes to be buffed to oblivion, they’re just asking to y’all to realize that “”“no skill”"" characters shouldn’t be ragged on all the time just because you think the person behind it isn’t brainless or “abusing” the character’s easy-to-pick-up nature. Like Brig, Moira, Winston, and Sym. Because people BENEFIT from those characters in the same way you benefit from using Ana, Widow, and Hog/Ball/Orisa.

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114

What does this mean? How do you exclude any changes from affecting Competitive?

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You do know that… if they’re NOT changed in competitive… it goes the SAME for quickplay and arcade… right?

They’re not. Asking for buffs. They’re asking that people realize. These characters don’t need insane nerfs, like the fanbase is calling for.

EDIT: Fam you really went through that WHOLE reply and STILL focus on the wrong thing I’m impressed and ashamed.

EDIT #2: Okay how about this just take Ranked OUT of the equation for now. It’s about “stop saying these characters should be removed because YOU think they’re bad/op”. NOT about RANKED.

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I believe that it’s incredible that Overwatch makes you feel that way!
Most of the “braindead” comments stem from their personal frustrations for that Hero.

Just rock on!

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117

Accessibility in game design should affect primarily the skill floor (aka ease of use) and not so much the skill ceiling (aka mechanical skill). And accessibility in game design is a GOOD THING.

That’s what ramps do in real life – because success and happiness in life for those with bad legs shouldn’t be hindered by inaccessible sidewalks and roads.

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Oh I’m not surprised by that one bit.

Just check out the kill-cams I have to deal with in <500. People with the most aim-assisted server-side makeawish hitreg and other dda tech. Meanwhile I have to make two pixels at 1600p line up precisely within 1/200th of a second for any damage numbers to register. It’s a physical challenge for sure, but not a mental one. Because aim is easy to bot: if LoS=true, headshot. I won’t ever lose to brains, just faster monitors.

And this is the last FPS-like I’ll tryhard and compete in. The future (for me) is back to beating people with brainpower not reaction times.

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^ This x1,000.

Dude, no. What people are saying - and I agree - is that it’s hard to make a game accessible to every disabled person without creating unfair advantages in the overall atmosphere of a competitive game.

This game is for you, it’s for me, it’s for everyone. But you need to accept that the world can’t cater to you, especially if it screws things up for other people - you have to just adapt and do the best you can. Hopefully, it’ll give you the drive to try harder.

I’m all for accessibility options as long as they don’t hurt the main game in any way. I’m glad they finally figured out how to add subtitles in. I’m glad they worked on improving the colorblind options (even though I hear they’re not the greatest, sadly). I’m all for them doing anything that doesn’t hurt the game.

Honestly, I wish you the best of luck. But if I had to give you any advice, I’d say just play what you like, what you find the most fun. NOT what you “can” play. Don’t limit yourself by what’s easiest for you. Play what you like anyway.

You don’t have to be good. The goal is to have fun. And if you want to be competitive, then you can still do that (and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t). It’s just going to be hard. I like the phrase, “Work twice as hard to be half as good,” for us disabled people. It’s not an easy road, but we’re forced to take it anyway. Make the best of it.

Signed,
A legally blind Tracer main.

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120

this man right here is the reason everyone keeps leaving this community lmao

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121

Honestly Ashe’s aim is weird for a lot of people also.
My Widow scoped accuracy is like low-mid 60’s
My Ashe ADS accuracy is like low-mid 50’s and I am working to make it better but there is something so weird about her aim.

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Play a different game that plays to your strengths. FPSes just arent for you.

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What I think some people mean is that it kinda is because accessible and viable aren’t one and same. It’s like someone with a movement impairment wanting to join a marathon using some sort of cycle and the argument was that because of their impairment they can only cycle about as fast as others can run so it’s accessible and viable, but the problem lies in the fact that there’s nothing stopping an able bodied from also then joining with the cycle and going faster than everyone else.

If you make a hero that doesn’t need aim but has the same output as another hero that requires a lot of aim then the non-aiming hero will always have an advantage assuming equal skilled players as the non-aiming players can use their focus on other important things. Such a hero would also be reliable which is one of the reasons why goats was so good.

If you wanted to balance it out then you’d have to make it so that the hero that doesn’t require aim would have to have worse performance than an aim heavy hero played well. It’d still be accessible but not really viable in higher skill tiers but you could still play and reach ranks you deserved. It’s just that then you have the problem of abled people demanding those essentially “training wheel” heroes to perform just as well as heroes that demand more.

Ideally all heroes would scale with skill to equal levels while some being easier to pick up but just as hard to master but it’s nearly impossible in practice.

Pretty much. Just really hard the more complex the game is.

But that’s kinda a different thing. Going up steps isn’t a competition and if there was you wouldn’t be allowed to bring a ramp to sprint up to as an abled competitor.

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Unless you have doubts about the SR/MMR system of OW, then differently-abled players should be able to keep up with their normally-abled counterparts.

I just don’t get it – even with all the posts here about how to design for inclusion without prejudice to competitive aspects of a game, why is it that players here want to tolerate barriers to inclusion?

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There have been people who were deaf, color blind, almost blind or even lacked arms who reached GM.

They managed to reach that level because they relied on other aspects of the game other than just aiming and twitch reactions. The game is already inclusive as is. You know well you’re going in with a disadvantage playing a competitive game, it’s up to you to make do with what you are good at.

There’s difference between accessibility and asking for advantage because you lack one factor of many required to play the game.

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126

You’re showing far too much aggression here after literally no instigation. You’re arguing a non-point to somebody who was never saying you were wrong.

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Now, you’re only talking about aim here. The problem with certain ‘‘low skill’’ heroes aren’t necessarily their aim either. Moira is just super easy to play positionally and game sense-wise. Same thing for Orisa. Old Brig was like that.

Widow is also considered braindead and hated by the majority of the community. Not because of aim. Because a good aimer doesn’t have to think at all to generate lots of value

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Completely agree. I got 7 fps and I can’t use any hitscan effectively. Other people are legally blind and play the game, or play with their feet. It’s really what overwatch is about. Heroes from everywhere. “Never see the world for what it is, always see it for what it could be.”
Mechanical skill can have it’s value and reward, but there’s more to the game than just aiming, that’s what makes it such a good game.

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If you have disabilities that prevent you from doing certain things then I think your expectation would be that you are placed at a rank appropriately with other people of similar skill.

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You’ve been passive aggressive and put in words in so many posters mouths here. Not only that but you told a poster with hearing disability that they’ve lost their credibility as a player. I’m having a hard time taking your post seriously since all you’ve been doing is insulting people.

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I feel ya OP. I have a spinal condition that has caused much nerve damage, and causes wrist/arm/leg ticks/spasms, constant blinking, shaky hands, slight hearing problems, and sometimes the muscles get insanely tight like a really bad muscle spasm but worse, and sometimes paralysis (though mostly in my legs).

I personally have been enjoying the challenge of trying to play characters like Baptiste, Ashe, and Tracer though. But I totally feel ya.

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