Re: Should Swamp stop allowing sighted players?
A few questions, or rather theories, have been scattered around in this thread but I've been avoiding posting anything myself. I really don't want to sway things in either direction unfairly, and I think if I accidentally hinted at the side I'm on, there would be some people who would side with it even if they didn't personally feel that way. So here goes. I'm going to try to remain as neutral as I can be.
When it comes to the graphics, the user can only see about 10 tiles away from them self, and most players tell me they can hear loot and other sounds about 40+ tiles away.
The graphics do allow the user to see loot and zombies on the other side of walls, which is something sound does not help much with.
Groups of zombies can be hard to count visually because they can occupy the same space/tile and appear as just 1 red blob. It could be 3 zombies, or 30, so in many ways that is the same predicament that sound-only players find themselves in.
When in close combat, the exact positioning of the graphics offers a huge advantage. You are very unlikely to run into obstacles or get yourself cornered, unless it is a very large number of zombies closing in on you.
Much of the time I play Swamp, I play with the sound muted, so the graphics alone are enough to keep me alive. This supports the idea that graphics give a ton of information to the player, especially within buildings. This also supports the idea that sighted users don't as easily adapt to a sound-only environment. The sounds help me so little, that it isn't even worth hearing them.
The graphics for loot are the same, even if the sound is different. So if I visually see some loot in front of me, I have no way of knowing whether it is a gun, food, or even a crate. Some game items have different sounds, so in this case the audio gives information that the sight does not.
Vi sually a player can identify the types of zombies that are approaching, unless they are in a group. The same can be done with sound, but I would imagine it is more difficult.
I don't know what the percentages are, but I do think there are quite a few people playing with the graphics enabled. This could mean they are low vision players or full sighted players, but the number could be as high as 10%. It is also possible that some of these people just never bothered to turn the graphics off, which improves game performance if you don't need the graphics. We do have a dozen or so players who have told me they play Swamp with sighted family or friends, so there are at least that many fully sighted players floating around.
I totally agree that a simple "Yes" or "No" vote is less than ideal. I don't want to solve this problem with time spent coding, so I'm not really considering the solutions that are essenti
ally adding new features. I really do hate working more on Swamp, and I feel really silly each time I tell people that Swamp development officially ended... um... like a long time ago. Ending development didn't seem to save me did it? ROFL!
I wouldn't even have bothered with this vote except I started to get more and more random foreigners skyping me, whining and complaining because I am going to ban their sighted friends. It started literally within half an hour of someone first bringing this issue to my attention, so the rumor mill was already in full swing and people were in an uproar about mean old Aprone who was going to unfairly hand out bans for something there is no rule against. So yeah, immediate headache. The quickest way to shut everyone up was to just put up the poll and plaster messages about it on the main
server. For at least a while, it is off my shoulders while everyone argues about what to do, hahahaha. Sorry about my frustrated rant. Please continue!
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=155386#p155386
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