Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » I know it's an april fool's joke but...

Can we get an option to turn off the upside down images? This is extremely disorientating and is actually causing me to experience some dizziness and anxiety.

Seconded, it’s causing me to have vertigo, blurred vision and nauseous.

It's so strange because I didn't think something as simple as upside down images would cause me to feel this way but I'm having to avoid specific parts of the site and even leave the site all together for several minutes to over an hour in order to not feel messed up. It's like my mind is trying very hard to overcorrect the images being in the wrong direction and it makes me feel really uneasy and weird. I guess it's like a vertigo feeling, but it feels a lot like an uncanny valley feeling too.

Temporarily changing your timezone to a place where it's not April 1st should get you out of it.

I didn't think it was fair to have to change my time zone to then have to change it back for an april fool's joke. We often get options to opt out of the site games, things that affect your experience while using the site, and even the birthday messages. It made more sense to me that we could actually have an option that we naturally opt out of doing those, since there are also a lot of people who don't appreciate participating in April Fool's jokes due to a lot of people being inherently cruel with them.

Being forced to participate in the event unless we manually changed our time zones and then have to remember to go back and fix them later is different than getting to mark a tally that allows us to opt out of something that was literally causing users to experience disorientation, vertigo, and nausea.

I left the site for the remainder of the day because of the feature despite wanting to be on and work on my own things.

Understandable, but it also seems strange to add a full option to opt out of a one-time, one-day thing, especially when plenty of the users negatively impacted seemed to quickly also just leave the site for the day, and so wouldn't have benefited from it anyway (since it'd be over by the time they knew about it).

Does seem like there should be something handy for times like this where it can really mess with people, even if it might ruin the prank a bit. In the meantime, there is at least the ability to change timezones to duck out of it.

I think something in the future would definitely benefit the community since we got an option to opt out of a character sending you a birthday message, which happens only 1 time a year? So I don't think it's wrong to ask to have something for a 1 day out of year opt out option like april fool's jokes that could cause these types of visual discomforts. I don't think kim's intentions were to harm anyone, but it does put a huge bummer on the situation for people who didn't get to enjoy the site for the day or couldn't do so unless they edited their time zone and then have to edit it back later. If we can have a birthday message to opt out of, I really don't think it's reaching all that far to request the same type of opt out option for april fool's day.

EDIT: I spoke incorrectly, I thought we DID have an option to prevent our characters from sending us a birthday message. I believe I'm actually mistaken and you can't turn that off. Unless you can and I can't find that option anymore. lol

I agree, it would be nice for next year to have an option to turn it off. I got very dizzy when I saw the images, I understand I can change my timezone but it would be much easier if there would be an option to turn it off

Just for clarity, I was talking about it as a thing that will only ever happen once - not once a year, but once ever. Since each year we get something different, and it's not always something that would make sense to block or could necessarily be blocked in the same way - such as when the prank was the maps pre-announcement and the site was only affected by having a bonus (and entirely optional to use) feature, times it's just a weird announcement, etc.

That said, if I remember right, another that was problematic for a lot of folks, if I remember right, made things move on the page. Maybe an option (perhaps related to the option to turn off throwable items, or other settings I might be forgetting exist) to simply turn off potentially-jarring visual effects like movements (which may have a negative impact on certain EW features, like no longer being able to tell if an enemy is being attacked since it wouldn't shake anymore), things being flipped odd ways, etc, could help folks more troubled by such things without specifically targeting April Fools stuff (so it's not necessarily revealed immediately, has broader usage, and wouldn't create an expectation to never see any April Fools stuff).

That's definitely a really useful way to go about it! Having an option to remove anything that would cause visual effects on the site would be super helpful I think to a lot of members.