What causes the new-board migraines and how to cope

Siv75

What causes the head aches and migraines / eye strains

I, like many have been getting migraines with the new game board. This is rather my favourite game so I have still been trying to find ways to play it. It got me into thinking though of what causes this. I recorded the gameplay into a video and studied it. Then it became very clear. The board is dark now... even more dark during enemy turn. Then the eye adjusts to the dark... making our pupils large. Then during gameplay, there are split second flashes that are bright. Since our pupils are already large...the flashes affect our eyes is a negative way...not giving them any time to adjust. It's like looking into a camera's flash directly during photography...except it happens many time over a few seconds. Worst still our pupils are now constantly adjusting making the eye muscles fatigue very quickly and eventually causing the migraines for those sensitive to such instances. These photos should illustrate this issue: 

How can we cope with it in the mean time? 

Here are a few things you can do to help in the meantime as a workaround while the developers provide a fix:

1. Look away during the enemy turns and after making your turn immediately. Turn on sound so you know when to look again. 
2. Play the game in a bright area (closer to sunlight) where the pupils get smaller so they don't keep readjusting based on the screen.
3. Adjust your screen setting to a brighter setting, again to keep the pupils small.

Note that these are just work-arounds for the meantime are is not an equivalent for medical advise, nor will it help those with coloraturas blindness nor epilepsy. The real solution would hopefully come from the developers soon; however, i thought of sharing this in case it may help those like me with head aches and migraines cause by eye strain. Migraines are especially painful and debilitating and hope this could help someone. 

justsing

Those screenshots say it all. Thank you for your super informative post! Really hope the devs fix the issue quickly, so that players like you don’t have to deal with this!

Chameleon

Wow.. Thank you so much for breaking this down into clear information that the developers can work with!!  I still feel that they need to revert immediately, at least until the Versus season is over, and tweak the new boards, WITH INPUT FOR THE COMMUNITY (yes, I'm volunteering to help!) rather than try to live tweak what is very obviously broken currently.

The next versus season is for the Power Stone, if I recall correctly, and people will be going hard for that purple stone.  Perhaps making one small change at a time would work better (while taking note of the obvious issues we've been pointing out and avoiding those altogether)?  I'm not really sure, I just want to help.

BeetleGeorge

It would be really great for sensitive persons like us to be able to switch off all this flashing shown in the screenshots above. I understand there are people who like it flashy but I very much hope that there will be an option for those of us who have troubles with it. Maybe the promised April update we give us something in that way. 

Aweberman

While I do not have any particular light sensitivity, it seems to me that the brightness of your environment does make a difference.

Playing in bed with the lights out really muddies the differences between red and purple and between blue and green (though this could also be iOS’ night shift) while also making the dimming on the enemy turn more pronounced (though, again, this could be the automatic brightness adjustment). 

Meanwhile, playing in the middle of the day while sitting in my car, everything really seemed much better.

McPosterson

This is wrong.  Straight wrong

Players should no have to change physical comfort for bad game design.

Sputt

What causes the new-board migraines and how to cope?

There is zero defense for making the players COPE with a migraine the game is causing. The only way I'm coping, is to uninstall. 

animaniactoo

BeetleGeorge said:

It would be really great for sensitive persons like us to be able to switch off all this flashing shown in the screenshots above. I understand there are people who like it flashy but I very much hope that there will be an option for those of us who have troubles with it. Maybe the promised April update we give us something in that way. 

Yes - back when I got sick and had to quit the game* because I was regularly being triggered, I realized that there are SOOOOOO many flashes in the game. And that was before they made the background darker. I wish that turning off special effects also meant the flashes or at least greatly reduced the level of the flash. Because there isn't much that you can do to replace that "hey, look at me, pay attention to me" dynamic which IS valuable. But when it's a problem for a player, it would be great for the player to be able to choose which portion of game play is important to them.

FWIW - on the coping front, one of the things I tried was to make my move and then immediately cover the screen with my hand. Wasn't effective enough, but might be worth trying for others.

*It is likely that most people here don't recognize me, that was a couple of years ago. I dropped back in here after seeing a post on my FB wall and wanting to catch up with what was going in.

Aweberman

You know, I was just wondering about this last night as I was doing PvE clears around 11pm, half asleep, and with my contact still in. Blasting through the easy nodes I started to feel a little dizzy, but one significant part of that was popping in and out of matches so quickly. I wondered why that wasn’t more problematic for some. And apparently it was.

Sekilicious

Playing Polaris in PvE probably exacerbates this. Between every round there are numerous flashes. 

Zalasta

Yikes! I've had character effects turned off forever now, so I didn't even consider how much worse this could be with them turned on.  Maybe I'll turn them back on for a bit and see how long it takes to give myself a seizure. LOL