Arcanists have the wrong colour scheme

DTStormfox

I am pleased that we have a new class but there is an issue with the colour choice of the class.

While green is a fantastic colour, it does cause a huge problem. Colours have meaning and serve a purpose. Our brains have been wired to recognise friend from foe and comfort from danger and threat. Humans use sight, and thus colour, to analyze the situation within milliseconds. Even before we realise what colour we see, our brains associate the colours we see with a preset response/emotion.

For example, green is associated with comfort. Research has actually demonstrated that immersing yourself in a greenspace (park, garden, forest, etc.) reduces stress levels (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494422000019). Furthermore, in gaming, green is generally associated with 'friendly'.

In a PvP-environment, where enemy special effects (aoe circles, sparkles, etc.) are shown to indicate a threat, green is a terrible choice. First of all, it doesn't induce the emotional response that is required. The response should be "threat" and stress-inducing. Second, the green effects from the Arcanist class get mixed up with actual friendly effects. Which makes it near impossible to distinguish an enemy' Arcanist effect from any friendly effect.

Although my request probably doesn't have much weight. I would like to request the Arcanist class to get a different colour scheme.
Personally, I would've gone with a shade of purple (or orange). The point is, going with any shades of green for class effects, is not a great choice.

FeedbackOnly

It's the lore to the daedric Prince that make green appropriate. Purple has previous associations with sorc class

Gnesnig

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

It's the lore to the daedric Prince that make green appropriate. Purple has previous associations with sorc class

And that's another questionably choice already brought forth by other people - to align a class with a Daedric Prince. And yes, it's already known in UI/UX design what effects green and red have. But, it is not surprising that the UX team within the development didn't get it's voice heard. There's a number of examples for that in this release alone:

- Fishing tab default focus
- constant rotating animation with bright light causing nausea and worse
- Lack of contrast in many areas of necrom
- Changing the default behaviour of new quest acceptance instead of mentioning it in the patch notes

Especially the latter is a thing I see product owners fail at numerious times. They think changing the default will alert people to the feature and it does, but almost never in a positive way as naturally the majority of people are resistant to change.

In an environment with a community, word will spread about the setting to those that want it and you could always enable it by default on new characters.

So all in all I'm sorry to say that both UX and accessibility teams do not have an equal voice or are overruled by other interests. It's unfortunate and I feel for those workers, but I can't say it's rare in the digital product industry.

emilyhyoyeon

I actually think the non intuitive problem with the color would be fixed if the color were more chartreuse with more black incorporated instead of 95% grass green.

ZOS_Icy

Greetings,

After further review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic.

Thank you for your understanding.

Gnesnig

ZOS_Icy wrote: »

Greetings,

After further review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic.

Thank you for your understanding.

I don't understand. What does lore have to do with UX? Lore is only briefly mentioned in this thread, but the crux of the post is about using the wrong color for the message. Even if lore is the reason for that, it still creates the wrong signal, which is what the post is about.

DTStormfox

ZOS_Icy wrote: »

Greetings,

After further review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic.

Thank you for your understanding.

I don't really understand why you made this decision. My post is not about lore, it is about a design choice affecting gameplay.

DTStormfox

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

It's the lore to the daedric Prince that make green appropriate. Purple has previous associations with sorc class

I understand. But my post is about design choice, not lore. Green is not a great colour because it is confusing in PVP.
Purple was only a suggestion, any colour but green will do.

Gnesnig

@ZOS_Icy Please correct your mistake and move this to bug reports instead.