Colorblind modes are useless?

[complexxL9]

Ok so to be fair I am not sure how useful those modes are for other colorblind people, I’m just talking about my experience and to me they make no difference, I’ve tried multiple modes, even though I know I am red/green colorblind the relevant filter makes little improvement over my experience.
I can barely tell the difference on the rare vs epic drop color, but enabling the filters does little to address it or it just makes other color combinations harder to tell apart.
I’m not giving specific examples, because
a) I don’t remember the details since my experience is from the launch and I don’t remember specifics, just the general impression, currently I am playing without any filters
b) specific details about colors are beyond my point

And the point is that please consider making other design changes to improve colorblind experience, to give some good examples from 10+ years ago when I was playing wow, enabling colorblind mode made it so gold/silver/bronze had letter indicators G/S/B that is one example that actually makes a difference with color blind mode on.

Basically, instead of doing color filters, do things like distinct shapes forms and contours.
Another good example of that would be Dota(1/2) heroes, you can make them completely black and you can still instantly recognize them from their unique shape. Also changing things like green/red dots on the mini map become blue/red is also a better approach than applying color filter to the whole game which might worsen things in other areas.

These examples do not translate well to NW since there is no gold/silver/bronze or different races/heroes, but I am sure there are plenty opportunities for improvement, I acknowledge it is way more effort than a color filter and is very unlikely to be implemented.

My primary concern is I can’t tell the quality of the drops apart quite instantly especially if the picture of the item takes more space and there is little color left on the icon background.
Some things I can think of to improve it:
a) customizable quality palette, pick custom color for each quality
b) create distinct item icon frames for different qualities (like simple border for common, and some vine entangled border for legendary or whatever, you get the point)
c) introduce “quality markers” and stamp them on the item icons once colorblind mode is “on” (for example it could be something similar graphical icon as for monsters with the \\ /// vs \ // vs \ /, of course you don’t want to confuse players by implying that these types of monsters drop this type of quality, I get that there are a lot of things to consider and it is hard).

For the drop bags on the ground, I can also barely tell what color drop that is, so it could make a distinct sound on the drop event based on the quality (maybe it does now, but I can’t really tell if they are different) or make bags of different shapes or not bags at all.
For example, common - a bag, rare - a small crate, epic - a chest, legendary - golden chest. Again, I understand these have drawbacks like immersion, a chest or a crate is difficult to conceal for those who care about things like that.

I am pretty sure there are more things to be improved, the things that I’m not even consciously aware of at the moment but would improve the experience considerably if they had other visual cues besides colors.

TLDR:
please try to not rely on color alone to make things distinct, always use secondary visual cues - form, shape, icon/letter indicator, contour, border etc.

[Virkful]

@Developer
What is partial colorblindness:

1. Partial colorblindness(-nomaly) is when people have difficulty on seeing differences on similar colors, such as deep yellow and green, light green and yellow, deep blue and purple, deep red and black, red and brown.
2. -nomaly in general means you are defective towards one side of the colors in spectrum, depending on the seriousness, the zone could be minor or major.
3. -nopia means you are dead towards one side of the colors in RGB, so a protanopia in spectrum can’t see red but green.
4. Protanomaly means you are defective towards RED, thus having difficulty seeing red, doesn’t mean that you’re blind to red, but when things are red, they’re close to black or close to unrecognizable, such as fighting Neishatun from Tempest Heart, the aoe effects on ground are barely recognizable, and personally thinking I’m not a heavy -nomaly person, but I’ve been picked out by “regular” people that there are dead obvious red spots at bottom of unripe tomato when its about to starting to become ripe, but all I see is green/white, no red, but can I see red? Yes I can, a ripe tomato is red, but those are the ones I can see, like R255 G0 B0 red, the obvious red, but when I’m put in a room of red environment(like Tempest Heart), I will start to have difficulties seeing them, it only helps when you don’t put similar colors together, but then of-course, for regular people, they might be dead obvious, so you might need to actually take opinion on actual colorblind people to help code the accessbility.

HOW TO FIX THE CURRENT SITUATION OF COLORBLIND ASSIST IN NEW WORLD:

1. 100% get rid of the current coding, it doesn’t help, but make situation worse.
2. Simply substitute colors, and try not to use similar colors, for example if you already used blue on something, don’t use purple on something else where the selection could be near each other, for example rare and epic equips, don’t use similar colors near each other. An easy example for substituting is turning red into blue(for protanomaly), such as health bars, enemy aoe indicators, make rare equips sky-blue and epic deep purple(for protanomaly), I know no-filter is already like that, but it’s not separate enough, you need to make rare’s blue even more lighter(for protanomaly). Or an even easier visual effect, bracket them differently(Sort of like the glittering effect of named or Legendary equips).
3. If possible, have a bar slider so people can adjust how heavy the setting does, as -nomaly people can vary between a heavy -nomaly or light -nomaly.

The situation of current colorblindness accessibility in New World:
It seems like it was programmed by someone googled what colorblindness was, and literally wrote codes that fits the description, instead of writing codes that “assists” the situation, literally turning every -nomaly people into -nopia, which frankly means “making the situation worse”.

Random picking 2 other recent colorblind topics:

1. Garden of Genesis Colorblind
2. Color blindness

It’s been many posts, and devs have picked up quite some, but its been a year and colorblindness support has not been properly implemented yet, the current one is more of a taunt than help.

[ARubberDuckey]

I want to point out that my post was in the past and they did in fact change garden of genesis and made the poison pool more visible. I was very happy with the devs response time to that because they had a minor change after about a week and they overall changed the pool color completely. After the changes I have had no problem identifying where the pool is. Granted my color blindness is due to weaker cones in my eyes that cause close colors to blend in.

[Virkful]

@ARubberDuckey

Is it a global change for genesis’ last boss poison pool? Or a colorblind assist change?

I don’t think it’s bound to colorblind filter, thus it could help on certain types of -nomaly, but make things worse for Deuteranomaly, but I’m a Protanomaly so I can’t speak for them.

Since the poison pool is swirly with a bit of white in it, it should be obvious to spot (in comparison to Tempest Neishatun’s AoE).

Great to see that they did improvements on some points.