Arachnophobia mode?

Community General Discussion
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Ok, so here’s my take on this, and I apologize in advance if this becomes a wall of text.

First off, I don’t personally care one way or other that they added this setting. I do have arachnophobia, but not enough that I won’t play a game because of it.

Secondly, for the people that do, and this setting helps them, then kudos to you.

So that said, when I opened the game up after the update for the first time, and I saw that new setting, I literally laughed out loud, and said “why in god’s name is this here?”. Now, I didn’t give much thought about it, until I saw the newer threads about it, and was instantly overwhelmed with the split on how players perceived this setting.

I had no idea that arachnophobia was such an issue with this game that it would drive Product Management/Whomever to allow development time on this. So background on that statement: It is generally advisable to not just throw in features to a software application because you think it’s a good thing to do, or because a customer or two asked for it. I’ve worked with a company that did that, and the developer hell that it caused what a nightmare. Suddenly everyone wanted everything for their specific case. This is not a tenable agreement. Generally speaking, you make changes based on direct feedback from a good amount of your consumers - and by that I mean enough percentage of your consumers to warrant said change.

Now, I went ahead and searched the forums for arachnophobia. There were so few forum posts, and most of the ones I did open were more along the lines of “I have severe arachnophobia, but I’m ok with the Nerubian, and the spider mount”. Oh, and the few that were just mentioning the movie. I don’t think I saw a single post complaining about arachnophobia causing players to not play the game.

I saw the article that mentioned that 5-6% or something of the global population have arachnophobia, and so we decided to add this setting because of this. Ok, that’s fine, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t care one way or other. However, did you do the research to see how many subs you’ve lost, or would gain by adding this setting? Was it worth the cost? Well, that’s not for me to decide. But I will say, you have now opened up Pandora’s Box. You’ve added this setting and now are stuck with the precedent. If you stick with it and add more settings in the future, for like, maybe people that are afraid of snakes…or, as mentioned here, what about people that are afraid of spiders and crabs - then that’s great (but I feel sorry for the Product Management and developer hell you might have introduced here). Did you consider scorpions? Those are arachnids too you know.

I dunno, just my thoughts. The setting is fine, but I hope they understand the precedent they’ve set.

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The precedent of adding a feature that a very large amount of games have for people that have severe arachnophobia? It might not affect you, but it simply means the feature wasn’t meant for you. Doesn’t matter what you think about it, I am sure there’s more than a few people happy for it.

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I do note that one of the first mods, if not THE first mod, for Skyrim turned spiders into bears.

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i did find a major flaw with it, spider mounts remain spiders. and those things are far creepier and far larger than most spider models in-game

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Hmmm, could have sworn those were supposed to change as well - but they won’t change on the fly, you might have to dismount and re-mount? Otherwise, sounds like a bug that should be reported.

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they wont change a mount skeleton for it. spiders walk forward and crabs walk sideways

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Your caveman ancestors didn’t like getting bit by spiders. Blame them.

If someone doesn’t like spiders I can’t imagine they like lobsters much better though.

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the filter should have been corgies

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I don’t have any other games that I play that have this setting. I had no idea up until…now…that this seems to be a thing? And that’s fair.

The main point that I wanted to make is that, now that they’ve opened up this box…they better be ready to start supporting other filters.

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Honestly, I’m OK with the Arcnaphobia filter. Spiders dont bother me at all, but ive been using it because crab bosses are hilarious esepcially when they drop down from the ceiling on a web.

Your point is extremely valid though

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I think this is where the dislike of it comes from, and really the questioning behind even adding it.

Roughly 2-6% of the population actually has arachnophobia, disproportionately affecting women over men. And of that 2-6% a very small portion play wow. Of them, it’s probably even less that are so affected it results in them being unable to play the game.

It’s a setting made for like .1% of the playerbase at best, and from a business standpoint, this change is a positive for so few people it’s not worth the money investment. Which makes it seem more like virtue signaling than a legitimate business move.

It also opens the door for every fear and phobia to have a special filter made specifically for them because this was made for so few people that blizzard would hardly have room to deny any other.

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its a way to have something wholesome to sell the expansion

they dont actually care about peoples arachnophobia.

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I do have mild arachnophobia, but the adrenaline is usually a benefit in the end.

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Yes! You get what I was saying.

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Ya, i don’t know about this.

There’s a line somewhere when trying to accommodate everything where things start to delve into the absurd and counter productive. Especially if it falls into some purity spiral and development and social standing gets consumed by who can be the most empathetic and accommodating.

Personally I have a fluffy bunny phobia and would like the option to turn them into spiders.

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It’s just silly and there are no pats on the back or golden sticker stars being handed out for humoring everyone’s ridiculous whims simply because you fear offending people. You literally are descending into a spider kingdom and you need a filter so you dont get too scared from the spoopy pixel spiders? c’mon man, how did we as adults end up here?

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Outside of the Pandora’s Box being opened cause of the setting. At least it was done without a penny spent on it. A lone Dev developed the setting on their own time and dime and got approval to make it an addition during the patch.

Given how many spiders there are in the game, and going code by code to be synced with a matching crab design, Virtue Signaling or not, that is some rock hard brass on them to sift through someone else’s code and make this grueling of a change at a click of a switch upon PrePatch Launch.

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Not true. They still had to pay for their time that could have been utilized for something else.

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Trying to find the tweet / X thingy. IIRC The Dev did everything on their own, no OT pay or anything, and was done during all off times. Either getting approval before hand and allowed to work from home on this personal project, or came in and volunteered their time during their days off.

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Well, I guess it’s a bit different, semantically, if they are hourly or salary. If they were hourly and off-time, OK, I’ll agree, kind of. If they were salaried, then, no, the point still stands that they could have been working on something else.

Again, whatever, it is what it is. I just hope Blizzard understands what they opened.

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