Motion Sickness

First and foremost, please know that this is a topic of discussion and development across multiple teams here. We have teammates who are sensitive to motion sickness. We care very much about making sure playing our game doesn’t make you – or them – feel unwell.

Although the maximum camera distance changes are the most immediately noticeable, there were several less-apparent changes made to how the camera functions in the pre-expansion patch, and we’ve already identified some cases where those changes may be causing issues. Here’s a few examples:

We’ve found an issue with camera shake effects, which we’re currently working to hotfix (if you’ve run Bloodmaul Slag Mines since the patch, you’ve likely noticed this one).

There was a systemic change to our graphical renderer which changes the way FoV is calculated. Manually resizing the viewable game area (which is usually done via “viewport” addons) may be affecting the game camera differently than before. We have identified the cause of this issue and are actively addressing it.

We’re also tracking down some vehicle-related camera bugs.
We believe that underlying issues like these are the actual source of many of the motion sickness concerns. To that end, if you find yourself feeling ill in-game, examples of where you were and what you were doing at the time would be very useful for helping us track down exactly what’s causing the issue, especially if you can provide video footage so that we can see what the camera was doing at the time.

This issue is very important to us, and we’re working hard on investigating and correcting it as quickly as possible. Any examples you can send us are very much appreciated. Please post any examples in this thread for ease of reference.

Thank you very much.

Everyone, I appreciate this is a large topic of discussion right now but please use this thread only to report cases where the camera is causing motion sickness

I extended the post cap on the Max camera distance reduced thread and any discussion which isn't a report of a cause of motion sickness should go into that thread.

Thank you.

Thanks for all the great responses so far!

Preventing the causes of motion sickness is the top priority and primary focus right now for some members of the World of Warcraft development team.

The videos provided by the community have been extremely helpful in identifying some of the in-game causes of motion sickness which has already lead to some hotfixes being implemented. We will continue to hotfix as frequently as possible.

We've also seen that, in a number of reports, the "action cam" setting had (possibly unknowingly) been turned on. The action cam is an experimental alternative camera, only available via console commands, that's still not fully polished yet. For this reason, we plan to disable the action cam entirely for the time being.

On the topic of camera settings, If you haven't already done so, it's worth checking your camera settings by pressing Esc and going to Interface Options > Camera. When you zoom-out using the scroll wheel your camera will only go as far as the max distance set on the "Max Camera Distance" slider, ensure it is set to "Far" if you wish to zoom out as far as possible. The behaviour of the camera can also be adjusted using the "Camera Following Style" setting in the same menu.

Please continue to provide videos and descriptions of situations which are causing headaches or motion sickness so that we can continue to investigate further.

Thanks again! :)

We’ve been able to use them to isolate a few more potential sources of motion sickness, and are currently working on sending out a small hotfix patch that will hopefully address at least some of them. We wanted to give a quick heads up on what we’re changing.

For starters, we were able to identify some potential issues with how flying mounts are behaving differently in patch 7.0.3 compared to 6.2.4 that we believe will help some players. Once this hotfix is live, flying mounts will no longer bank/lean to the sides when rotating in place, and the extent to which they lean when turning while in motion will be lowered back to how it was in patch 6.2.4. Additionally, we’re fixing an issue that was causing the camera to “pop” when landing or taking off on a flying mount.

27/07/2016 19:00Posted by Ananda

Another couple more to add:

Al'Akir in Throne of 4 Winds ... don't know if it was motion sickness but in the phase when I get pulled up to his head level, there was really bad shaking and he kind of separated into lots of bits which were all shaking around me. I had to close my eyes because it was making me dizzy & hope I was facing the right direction to kill him.

We've identified and fixed some bugs that were causing some fairly extreme issues with the camera while the player is considered by the game to be in a “vehicle.” Because of how that tech is used, this includes several situations that might not obviously seem like you’re in a vehicle, such as the later parts of the Al’Akir encounter.

28/07/2016 12:40Posted by Dio

I LOVE action camera! Why do I have to lose it because someone didn't bother to turn it off?! It's not even activated by default as far as I'm concerned! For god's sake I beg thee: leave it for addon creators! There's a thing called DynamicCam and it is glorious! As a melee I absolutely love the new camera angles.

Action Cam is an experimental alternate form of camera control that is currently unfinished and not quite ready for the general public. It had become available through a console command in the Legion beta, but since it doesn’t give any unfair gameplay advantages and (so we thought) had to be expressly activated by the player, we’d left it accessible through that command.

However, it has become clear that more than a few players have somehow turned it on without knowing, and it’s a major cause of motion sickness for those players. So, we’re going to disable it entirely for now, and plan to bring it back in a future patch once we’ve sorted out all the motion sickness issues and given it a little bit more polish.

These fixes will be active on the PTR and Beta realms for testing as soon as possible, and if all goes well, we plan to apply them to live realms on Monday, August 1. Once they’re live, please do continue to report areas of the game or activities in which you’re finding yourself feeling unwell. Videos in particular are extremely helpful, as they allow us to see exactly what the camera is doing at the time. We’re continuing to put our highest priority on resolving these issues and getting you back in the game without having to worry about motion sickness.