I bought the game at launch but stopped playing without ever subscribing because the constant screen shaking was making me ill. It was particularly bad because I was playing a sage, but nobody on the Republic side could really escape it because it happened whenever a sage was fighting something nearby. I figured I'd come back when a toggle was implemented. That didn't happen. After all these years I'd forgotten why I quit, so when someone mentioned an expansion, I decided to come back. I've been playing Empire side this time, so the issue didn't really come up until I got to Balmorra and had a bunch of quests that involved blowing things up. I couldn't find a toggle, so I Googled, and all I found was 8 years of complaints just like mine with no resolution or even developer comment. That's when I remembered why I quit so early. I've already subbed, unfortunately, because I didn't realize this was going to be a problem. I'm probably just going to let it run out. But I'll ask one more time before I do: please, please add a screen shake toggle. This is a glaring accessibility issue that affects large numbers of people.

It's a game and I play it to have fun. There are other parts of the game (grinding quests, crafting) where I'll 'suck it up,' but when it comes to actually playing my role in a group, that ought to be fun, or nothing is and there's no reason for me to play. Sure! Challenge me! Challenge me to make smart decisions on the fly. Challenge me to remain situationally-aware while demanding lightning-fast reactions to changes in my party's health. Challenge me to play offensively, weaving interrupts and CC and offensive dispels in among my heals. Challenge me with a complex priority system and a wide variety of mutually-interacting spells, random procs, and even encounter effects that modify my spell and target choice. Add a level of human complexity by challenging other players and tasking me to respond to their unpredictable behaviour. But don't 'challenge' me with the user interface. That's just poor (and lazy) design that actually interferes with implementing those other challenges. If you think a mouseover healer is 'sitting idly by and having the computer do most of the work for them,' you've got some serious misconceptions about what mouseover healing is and how it works.

I played EQ too, kid. You're not the only one with an 80+ cleric. And as far as difficulty, I'm sorry to break it to you, but EQ healing has nothing on WoW's current play.

You can't. Like I said, that's not something that can reasonably be mitigated - it's just something that's part of healing that DPS don't have to deal with. No, actually, if your mouse is over a player frame, you can't rightclick to move the camera - it brings up a menu. How exactly do you click on the desired frame without putting your cursor over it first? That means you can't use the focus frame for e.g. your tank. A lot of healers like to target the boss and focus the tank, or vice versa. And what if there are two targets that need monitoring - a 2-boss situation, for instance? Or an add that needs to be CC'd or interrupted in a fight with a boss whose casts need to be monitored? Any way you slice it, targeting players to heal them is tying up one of your limited (two) discretionary frames with duplicate information that's already displayed in your ops window. Mouseover healing is exactly the same as click-casting except that I "click" with my keyboard. In games where it's an option, I use a combination of both to avoid needing the modifier keys I can't hit - there are some spells I like to cast righthanded and others I like to cast lefthanded. But the action for either is exactly the same: place mouse over frame, press one button. You have to press two buttons in sequence for the same result. (migraines suck. Also, I too like unicorns.)

No, I'm not necessarily saying it's more difficult. Difficulty is subjective. I personally happen to find it easier to perform well as a healer than as another role. I am saying it objectively involves more physical interaction with the user interface, especially via the mouse. We do far more target switching - as a raid healer, every moment of every fight is the equivalent of an add phase. This, combined with the reactive nature of the job, necessarily ties up our mouse (and often our eyes) more than a DPSer's. And that limits our mobility and situational awareness. (I don't care how good of a multitasker you are, if you're selecting a target on the raidframes, you cannot, at the same moment, be using your mouse to move your camera around the room.) That's not really something that can be mitigated - we sort of just deal. But the other annoying thing about healing that DPS don't have to deal with is that it ties up our target and (for some) focus frame with duplicate information. Mouseovers mitigate that. And they also mitigate the sheer volume of button presses (without them we're generally doing twice as many for every action, except when we're spamhealing a tank).

I think they've specifically stated they don't intend to add mods or macros, no? If that's the case, and that's fine, then some reasonable healer-friendly UI features (mouseover, clickcasting, buff/debuff filtering) need to be baked into the game itself.

(wave) hey!

Obi Wan was not wearing a dress. He was wearing a closed robe, presumably over the tunic/pants standard outfit. I have never, ever, not once in the movies seen a Jedi in a skirt. Look closely at what the low level consulars are wearing. It's a short tunic and an ankle-length skirt. There is no precedent for that in the movies. If you couldn't see that a Jedi was wearing pants, it was because he was wearing a full-length closed robe.

I didn't realize MMOs were a sport. It's funny you should mention chess. I have a cousin who plays chess competitively. He's damn good at it. But he has cerebral palsy. He doesn't have the manual dexterity to pick up a chess piece and move it without knocking other pieces over and ruining the game. So in tournament games, he has an assistant - he calls out the move he wants to make, and the assistant moves the piece and records the move on his scoresheet. Does that "make chess easier"? Technically, I suppose. But no chess player in their right mind would argue that it matters. Chess is a game of the mind, and the board is only a physical representation of it - the real skill being challenged in chess is not in moving the pieces, but in deciding where to move them. MMOs are, similarly, games of the mind. They're not about pushing buttons. They're about deciding which button to push. There are computer games - FPSs - that are actually in part about pushing buttons, that actually pit opponents against each other in a test of hand-eye coordination and speed. But MMOs aren't like that. They're throttled by the GCD, and the combat mechanics are handled by RNG and stats rather than player aim, in a deliberate effort to remove most of the player's hand-eye coordination and latency from the equation. They're much more like chess than like football. At their core, they're really math games. And if you want to make a mental game fair, challenging, fun, and engaging, you start by removing unnecessary physical obstacles - especially those that don't affect all players equally. If you think of that as 'dumbing down the game,' then you're asserting that hand-eye coordination is the key MMO gaming skill. And if you believe that, you're not only probably a bad healer (because you don't understand the real game) - you probably also have terrible hand-eye coordination. You have to be almost as bad as me with my injuries in order to find any challenge whatsoever in MMO combat. You would be awful at a game that actually is about hand-eye coordination. I used to play shooters, and I would have eaten you for breakfast if you played at a level where you thought clicking a mouse on a 1/2-inch-square static box every 1.5 seconds was "skill."

Ah, yes, thank you, that's the solution to all my problems. Let me go back in time to when I was in the Navy and stop the 50-pound block of metal from being dropped on my hands, so that maybe I can move all my fingers, and then I'll get right on that.

If you could implement a well-known, well-understood feature that would make a large number of your customers happy and improve accessibility for customers with disabilities, with absolutely no downside, using mostly existing code (they already have targeting logic and mouseover detection), why would you not do it?

Well, some rudimentary level of customization of health frames would be helpful. Color, background, texture, size, shape, location, and buff/debuff filtering. Purely cosmetic stuff that could be built into the game's UI without hurting anything and would make a whole lot of people very happy. All the other stuff? Meh. I'm definitely against anything 'smart' like Power Auras; if we're going to need highly visible notifications of stuff, then those notifications should be built in by default, not left up to the player to configure.

Thanks Jooji And to those who think mouseovers are a "crutch" and those of us who use them are bad healers: Do you really, truly think that the skill in healing lies in the player's physical button-pressing? I don't. I think the skill in healing is a combination of the player's ability to: - Prioritize target selection on the fly, and use effective triage to keep everyone alive - Know their healing abilities and select the most appropriate one for the incoming damage - Be aware of their surroundings and the positioning of their group, and use area abilities and targets effectively - Predict incoming damage and use preventive abilities or precast heals at optimal times - Respond appropriately to encounter mechanics (PvE) or enemy abilities (PvP) - Manage their resource - Identify good times to use utility, dispels, and support abilities In short, I think healing skill is about decisionmaking. Button-pressing is simply how you convey those decisions to the computer. A bad healer, by my definition, is someone who makes bad decisions - and that person would remain a bad healer even if you hooked the computer up directly to their brain. If you really, truly believe that healing skill is about button-pressing, then you are probably a bad healer.

You apparently have absolutely no idea how real endgame healing assignments work. And while this may be the most ridiculous thing I've seen in the thread, the rest of the mouseover-haters don't seem to have any idea what they're talking about either. 1. Re: addon "bots" in WoW: It has been at least three expansions and five years since the last time it was possible to automate heal-targeting with an addon. Current raid frame addons are not bots. They are cosmetic modifications to the user interface. 2. Of course mouseovers aren't 'necessary.' Keybinds aren't 'necessary' either. The game could force you to actually click the icons on your action bars, just like it forces healers to click each time we switch targets. Would you like that? No? Didn't think so. It would slow you down and feel awkward, wouldn't it? Casting with just your keyboard feels smoother, doesn't it? 3. While mouseovers make healing target-selection slightly easier, this is not a bad thing, nor is it responsible for making any game too easy. Not unless you believe the entire difficulty of the game should rest on the backs of the healers and that artificially-throttling healers through awkward UI interactions is a good way to enhance difficulty. What mouseover targeting does is move one tiny step in the direction of leveling the playing field between DPS and healers in terms of our physical interaction with the game. It permits us to retain a boss target so we know what's being cast, just like DPS do. It keeps us from having to click something every time we want to cast - DPS already don't have to. It makes our gameplay feel as smooth and seamless and enjoyable as DPS gameplay. The playing field will never be completely level because a healer in a large group will never have his/her mouse completely free for movement and offensive target-selection, and healers will always have to devote more of our attention to the UI at the expense of the game world. But mouseovers bring us close enough that we can generally play at about the same level. This means that the game can be balanced around real difficulty that applies to everyone, rather than artificial UI-interaction difficulty that applies only to healers. And that's a good thing.

Just because I'm not hardcore about the Star Wars universe doesn't mean I won't be hardcore about the game. I haven't liked anything with the Star Wars label on it since The Return of the Jedi. But if they do the game mechanics well, you can bet I'll be hardcore. I mean...I f'ing hate the Warcraft universe. But love or hate the lore and graphics, WoW is a well-done game. Especially the endgame.

Yep. I'm being left out in the cold on my birthday

I'm lonely and cold

Ah, yes. Because, of course, all positive personality traits are so closely linked to age that as the average age of gamers has risen over the past decade, MMO communities have become dramatically friendlier and more mature. Or not. Adults blaming kids for the rampant obnoxious antisocial behaviour and trollery is understandable. It's driven by the same impulse that drives casual players to blame raiders for the same behaviour. It 'seems' to make sense, and it's definitely a whole lot easier to blame some group of 'others' than to consider the possibility that it's people just like you who are responsible. But the fact that it's understandable doesn't mean it's correct.

Succeeding in the MMO market has never been about innovation. Succeeding in the MMO market has always been, and remains, about starting with a familiar framework and overlaying it with other people's structural innovations implemented better, cleaner, more stable, more reliable than the innovators themselves could do, and combining that with engaging content. Will SWTOR's similarity to WoW hurt it? No. Not unless the implementation is bad.

God, you people talk fast. I was going to come chat in this thread yesterday, but something came up, so I decided I'd do it later.

This. Exactly this. Although since I played FFXI, I've sustained some injuries and have some joint and nerve damage in my left hand that makes function-key targeting unrealistic. Which makes mouseovers an important accessibility feature for me at endgame. I've already paid for the game, so I'm going to stick aroung and level, but if I get to 50 and there are still no mouseovers, I'm going to have to cancel my sub.

Anyone who knows how2mouseover knows how2hotkey, considering that the first requires the second.

Finally got sucked in on the 12th. Boyfriend a few days ahead, on the 9th. Cheers all