I want to play the game but i can't

Support Technical Support
1

Hey all.

After BFA come out I was a bit uncertain of the new expansion, if it was good or not, but I bought it later on, because I felt that I wanted to at least give it a try.

After I played it for about 1 hour I felt that my eye started to hurt and when I looked at it, it was all red and it took a few hours before i could play again. It took some time before I understood that it was the game that made me overstrain my eye and make it hurt.

I have tried to play a little bit again in Shadowlands, but I couldn’t even be in the game for 20 min before I felt the strain. When I’m on YouTube I can’t look at anything that has Shadowlands gameplay. So, I’m forced to stop playing even if I like the game, because I can’t look at it.

I tried to see if there was maybe something I could do to make it better, but there’s nothing. No one else seems to really have this problem and the few that do, they stopped playing the game as well.

Before, in Legion, WoD and BfA, I watched some YouTubers about how to get better at PvE and PvP, but many used an addon called ElvUI and I can’t use this one since it makes my eye hurt as well.

So if there is anything you guys can do to go back the old look of the game, like Legion or older, it would be great so I can come back and play the game again.

You don’t need to make a global change, just make an option for it.

Thanks for your time reading this and for the support.

1 Like
2

Hey there Nadith,

I’m sorry to hear about this eye strain issue that you’re having.

There are a couple of things that you can try out, both in-game and out of the game in order to reduce that type of eye strain.

  • Check your monitor settings! For example raise the contrast and reduce the brightness a bit, if possible lowering the colour temperature of the monitor can help. Most newer monitors have an eye health mode as well.
  • Avoid playing in a completely dark room and have a low light around you.
  • Make sure that you are sitting at an optimal distance from your screen, that depends on the size of your monitor.

In-game now,

  • Make the text a bit bigger - right-click the General tab above your chat → Font Size → choose one you’re comfortable with.
  • Enable the option “Do not Flash Screen at Low Health” - you can find that Interface → Combat.
  • Increase the Contrast slightly, while decreasing Brightness and Gamma a bit. You can locate those options in System → Advanced.

Finally it may be worth in potentially looking into various free eye strain reducing programs, that you can install, and check if they are suitable. Hopefully the above help!

3

i did try. but the text and so on has nothing to do with my problem.
its the picture of the game itself. the whole world and not really the text. i did try to change some of the settings and turn of alot of things.
when i could play. i allways run with outline turned of. for i could not see what to pick sense it was to hard and did not have the sparkles but i find a way to fix that :slight_smile:

here is some screenshots and you can see that it did not do to much in the game itself.
i did buy a new monitor before as i thought of the thing you said.
a other MMO i play the UI and so are smaller than i use in wow.
i sit pretty close the screen like 20cm (7-9") or so

thanks for the replay and i hope we can figure something out.

4

I have an idea of what your talking about, though I don’t have eye strain issues myself, but reading through what you have written. I might have a solution for you, but no guarantee’s, but it should at least give some help to you, and at least let you play again.
Your going to need to change the graphics settings in the program to get it to where you can tolerate playing the game.
If you have NVIDIA graphics card, then go and do a search for NVIDIA inspector, most games are pre set, but this program gives you far more control over your settings. I used to use it for fsx flight sim many years ago, and because it had settings the driver control panel did not, i was able to partially fix some of the problems. If its for an AMD graphics card, there are similar alternatives out there , at least similar to Inspector, but not as good. still better than the graphics card default settings, which most people never even bother with. give it a try you might be surprised and this might work for you! good luck!!

5

thanks i will look at it and see.
wow is the ONLY game i have problem with.
when all in my guild leveled to 60 i leveled an alt in my other mmo instead.
i hope this one can help me i will deffently look it up thanks.

ok i after some time i did find the program i did follow a youtube video so i could get the right link and so,
i did open it and i found a classic era wow settings.
i did try those and i did restart my pc to make sure.
but i feel it did not really do anything diffrent… im not sure maybe i do it wrong.
or maybe there is some stuff that i cant change…
i dont know anything about this kind of thing i never used it before :slight_smile:

6

when you open Inspector, there are many settings. As you have said you selected wow classic settings in the program. However these are just default settings similar to the game itself. What you need to do is experiment with all the settings to see what you can get.
If your trying to get similar settings to legion. Do you know exactly what is giving you eyestrain the most in the game. What I mean when I ask that is, are there any locations within shadowlands you are able to go where its not so bad?
The reason I ask, is maybe we can pin down exactly what is causing your eyestrain? Is it the spells causing it, is it specific locations? You can turn off, outline of your character as I am sure you know, that may help somewhat?
Its going to be about getting the balance just about right, that’s why it’s important to know what is causing this problem for you. Maybe we can find some settings that will work for you.
I know they increase the game’s specs in most expansions, and i am unsure what they did with BFA and SL to make it unplayable for some people because of eyestrain.
I am surprised that no one at blizzard has given any solid good answers since they made it, and I would be very surprised indeed if your the only person having eyestrain issues since BFA.
It might be because of Bloom, which can really mess with people in weird ways. I am not sure wow has settings to turn off bloom, but that is one thing you do need to turn off.

7

its really hard to say i cant show screenshots or anything on the forums. if you know the settings maybe here is a other kind of way you can contine and i try to explain and show examples. feel free to add me on battle.net (RyuguRena#2264)
for what i know it cant really be anywhere in the game at all.
its kind of looks like they added some kind of fog or something unsharping thing to the whole emmmm game world look.
i know i could play BfA ok as long as i did not use addon’s like ElfUI and if i used ConsolePort i could play for about 1 hour and then i needed to stop not sure why…
so its really hard for me to pin down exactly where and what it is. :slight_smile:

8

If you can spare a minute or two - this type of issue would be something we’d love to know more about. A click here (and a report with as much detail as you can provide) would be highly appreciated!

9

Are there any particular zones or elements in game that cause this, and do you know why? Afaik there’s no “old” look, unless this is some weird way of saying you don’t like certain UI elements?

If this isn’t a troll post, I would like to point to the “Interface” → “Accessibility” section, where you can adjust several settings to see if it helps you. Additionally perhaps the colorblind section might help.

In terms of ElvUI, go to “Skins” and then disable “Ace3” and “Checkbox Skin”, which will bring back the Blizzard style for pretty much everything where possible, while still using ElvUI. Any other components you’ll have to work with manually but you can adjust them to your needs if you want.

Something else that might help is disabling screen glow. Several addons can do this for you. If you have ElvUI and Windtools you can turn it off, otherwise “Leatrix Plus” can do this too. For Leatrix Plus this is /ltp in chat, then “system” → “Disable Screen Glow”. This glow can be quite a strain by itself.

Additionally if you have issues with brightness in certain zones (mainly bastion), I can recommend this weak aura: https://wago.io/UJSxi2LcP. It will put a brightness under your user interface and over the game, which makes it less bright.

Hmm this I don’t know, but perhaps some of the graphic settings can help with this? I would recommend to take a look at “System” → “Advanced” and then “Post-Process AA” to see if that makes it better.

Additionally you can play with image sharpness through your monitor (and any other settings), or try in-game. To do this set your “Resolution scale” to just under 100%, and under the advanced tab set Resample Quality to “FidelityFX Super Resolution”. When you’ve enable this, the “Resample Sharpness” setting to the right will take effect and you can make the image sharper if you wish.

Besides of all that, there are maybe several other suggestions I could make, but you’ve let on very little of what the cause is, just that it causes strain. I personally experiment with customizing the interface and location of elements, I have most important stuff around my character so that I don’t have to look away to see my health, buffs/debuffs/action bars etc, which reduces how far I have to move my eyes to see anything.

10

ok i will try.
sorry i have not given alot of info for its hard to really say what makes it happen.
i did see it happen when i did get form BFA to Sh0adowlands.
the reason why i said so little is as i said i dont fully know what makes it happen.
from what i have seen its like all zones.
i only been in SW Duskwood Westfall and the start of Shadowlands zones…
there might be something i might miss that i dont know of.

for the addons and how you have it setup i use the same way where i have most of the importent stuff around my character.
im abit sensative to what addons i use and how i use them…
most of the other MMO’s i tryed they dont really have addons like wow does. so i mainly use the default UI and that woeks ok.
like the one mmo i do play there is one addon that changes the names above the character to make them easier to read. but this one i cant use. it makes my eye hurt.
maybe its the contrast of the name change or something not sure.