Eye Strain

[Denley]

I found this weekend I had to log off secondary to increased eye strain. This occurred when playing at night in Dryfoot looking for ore, copper mainly. With the season being winter it felt like real time 60 minutes of darkness for every 30 minutes of light. After a while, I would just started logging off during game night and tried to catch game day.

When in a group, the eye strain felt less secondary to mainly being stationary, use of ground torches, and not have to look for small copper ore nodes.

Not sure if anyone else has had this problem. My Graphics card in a GTX 1060

Please consider:

1) Make day 16 hours and night 8 hours.
2) Make copper nodes in Dryfoot easier to see. The copper nodes are very similar colors to most of the background sand/vegetation/stone. Even in daylight, you have to be nearly standing on them to see them.
3) Adding a Game-time clock in discord or on this website.

Thanks for listening. Keep up the good work

 

[Undone]

I found this weekend I had to log off secondary to increased eye strain. This occurred when playing at night in Dryfoot looking for ore, copper mainly. With the season being winter it felt like real time 60 minutes of darkness for every 30 minutes of light. After a while, I would just started logging off during game night and tried to catch game day.

Seasons no longer have any impact on the day/night brightness. They only impact the length of day/night - but the relative brightness at night should be constant. Did you set your exposure compensation slider in the video settings to the minimum value?

 

[Denley]

Yes, exposure was at a minimum.

It had more to do with the length of night, constantly moving/panning, dryfoot being a large zone to cover, and looking for something that is hard to find even in the daylight.

 

[Blyte Plays]

Another person in my usual group, has resorted to simply logging off for an hour, everytime it turns night time, when they are doing solo play. Its gotta be irritating.

It's like looking for fine detail in a dark watercolor painting. I guess its realism... I mean it would be difficult IRL, to try night time gathering, so I really dont know a realistic answer, beyond having every node glow like tin does. Would it be possible to have nodes targettable like you can tab target monsters, when we wander about, giving you advanced warning, there is a monster somewhere ahead. Only in this case, use an alternative key, to scroll through node targeting? Then when you have them targeted, they glow?

This wont cause the whole screen to be lit up from nodes all over the place, in the way tin glows. Personally I'd hate it if the natural setting looked like it was full of phosphurecent glowing minerals.

 

[Battlestorm]

If you think the issues are from genuine eye strain then that could potentially be helped in a few ways:

1. Increase your frame rate by lowering your graphics settings. You could play at 1080 or 720p @60/75/120/144+Hz instead of 2K or 4K @30Hz. The "flickering" from low frame rates is hard on your eyes and brain. A better graphics card on a 75-144Hz monitor also helps, but may not be within everyone's budget. Some monitors have a flicker-free option, which is great. Flicker-free doesn't stop the computer screen from flickering, but it should stop the LED's inside the monitor from flickering and that's half the battle.

2. Try setting your graphics to V-Sync to reduce screen tearing (something hard to see, but your brain "sees" it and it no-likey).

3. A monitor will sometimes have a eye strain reduction setting. It really just lowers the amount of blue light (at the expense of turning the screen yellow-ish). This is marginal, but helps.

4. Invest in glasses with blue light reduction (or a prescription set of glasses with as much). I don't need a prescription, so I use Gunnars (amber lenses), myself, and I couldn't be a gamer without them (my job requires that I use a computer all day). I do not work for Gunnar.