Developers’ note: The ability to restrict the field of view was added in 9.2.5 as an accessibility measure to help alleviate motion sickness.
This confuses me. Multiple sources have said that increasing FOV beyond 90 improves their experience from a motion sickness perspective (I was looking forward to trying it tonight as I have a long history of in game effects triggering motion sickness), but it’s been hot fixed before I could even try it.
I’m not going to say things are ‘unplayable’ without it - let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of the player base have never had the opportunity to even try it, and locking it to 90 its the same default experience most of us have had up until now.
But for those who have tried it have said it gave them an improved in game experience - especially melee and tanks, who often have restricted FOV due to boss positioning during boss encounters.
I understand that adding a slider is not an instant hot fix option, it needs to be tested to ensure there aren’t any unintended consequences and a UI change needs a client update.
Simply saying “no” because it might give someone a competitive advantage is ridiculous for WOW. Anyone playing at the top levels of MDI or PVP will know about these sort of UI options in the same way that they use addons or WAs now. If it makes the game environment more accessible to more people - why is this a bad thing?
No, it wouldn’t be. They’re falling back on the same “our artists would be crushed if you couldn’t see and admire the underside of the tree canopy you are stuck under for an entire year” excuse that they used for pathfinder.
It’s that they don’t like players having options. There is one and only one right way to play the game. Giving players options allows them to choose to play the game wrong. Right down to the tiniest detail they need to control everything you do.
Or maybe it’s like when they put so many things on the gcd that never were before. Players used to reserve their big cds so they could stack them. We were told that they changed this so people could see those animations. And who was going to “see” those animations?
MDI viewers. It was all about optimizing the game for the millions of MDI viewers they thought would be watching if only the animations weren’t stacking.
I wish Blizz was as quick to address other “bugs” with this much haste. The Barbershop was added on Oct. 14th 2008.
Since the first day, it has forced the players camera to zoom in and has kept it there once you leave the chair, forcing you to manually set the camera zoom again.
The barber chair camera bug has been around for 14 years.
I guess you haven’t used it as much as I have. After you readjust it, sometimes your adjustment doesn’t stick and you suddenly find yourself running off at some bizarre angle and have to stop and readjust it again. And again. I had a new character just yesterday had to adjust it over a dozen times before it stopped forgetting. It’s darned inconvenient to have that happen while you’re tanking a dungeon.
I would bet money that it has nothing to do with “not wanting players to have options”. If they didn’t want players having options you wouldn’t have endless addons or weak auras that allow limitless options customizing your UI…and what about all the options with macros that we have? If they didn’t want you to have options they wouldn’t have implemented a camera zoom at all, plenty of games have a single fixed PoV. People talk so much about optimizing UI, efficient macros, addons, and weakauras precisely because people are experiencing the game wildly different from each other due to all the options we have.
I don’t believe the “unfair advantage” explanation because it is contradicted by so many things they do allow in the game. The advantage of being slightly zoomed out pales in comparison to the heavy hand holding of many addons and weakauras.
Who knows what the actual reason for them not wanting the zoom, but from seeing through the years in various games what kinds of things developers prioritize, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was as simple as the developers not liking the visual look of the game all zoomed out and that would be how the game would be exported to a wide audience since the best players and those who cared about min-maxing/optimizing would play with that camera setting.
The fact that they used such a bizarre excuse ( kind of like “People who don’t know how to use the interface panel are unfairly disadvantaged”) means it could have been anything, but probably was something they didn’t want to discuss.
Good luck with that. After you finish writing that, you can get to work on an addon that automatically decurses people without your input or draws/alters shapes and colors on the screen.
Heck just go all out. Make an addon that gives me the abilities of any given class I click on. Addons totally aren’t restricted to the rules and limitations of the game and even if you did find a way around it, Blizzard will totally just shrug their shoulders and totally not break whatever function the addon leans on to do what they don’t want you to do in the first place.
I’ve pretty much hated everything about the view and how the camera behaves ever since WoD, if I’m not frustrated with being too far zoomed in, I’m struggling with the camera getting constantly caught up in tree branches, banners and anything else that’s hanging around where the camera sits. I feel like in the past they made an effort ensure stuff like that didn’t happen, now i always feel frustrated and claustrophobic.
I really miss my massively zoomed out top down-ish view.
Considering how they designed SL dungeons (e.g. SD) to purposefully make you hate the camera, I don’t have any hope of this hotfix being reverted or the camera not being so annoying. It’s plainly intentional at this point and they just want the camera to be yet another annoying mechanic.