Do not add new colors - discussion

The purpose of this thread is to discuss arguments for and against adding new colors as proposed in this pull request: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3706

My view is that the primary objective for player colors should be to make the game readable for players and casters. In my view the suggested change detracts from that goal, as the addition of more colors makes certain color combinations more similar. For example, imagine playing a 1v1 with this color combination.

or a 2v2 with these

Trying to cast games with these similar colors would be even more of a nightmare.

It just seems like a completely unnecessary change that is not fixing an existing problem and is instead only potentially creating a new one. I think the colors are just about fine the way they are, and the focus should be just on improving them slightly (e.g. the current dark blue/violet should have white as a secondary color, not black, to maximize contrast).

My view is that there is no reason to add more colors, as we have enough colors for even 8v8, and this change just makes the game potentially less readable, since some color combinations are more similar than before, so these changes should not happen.

If you are in favor of these changes please explain why, and if you are against these changes please also join in the conversation so the devs have a sense of what the community thinks.

I would love new colours to be added to the game providing they don't hamper the ability to cast and tell apart players at a glance, as you mention.

While the new colours are very nice to look at, it cannot be said that they're different enough from the existing ones.

For reference, this is the current list of colours:

This is the proposed one:

While the original list of colours isn't perfect, the new one is much worse. If all of the most similar colours (neptune turquoise vs cyanide cyan, peachy orange vs barrel bronze vs cider yellow, pale sky vs positively pewter) were removed then I think this idea would have much less opposition. As it stands right now, though, I am against this change.

Keep the old colors.

At least organize the old colors. The rainbow scheme for organization is niiiiice

@tex said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

At least organize the old colors. The rainbow scheme for organization is niiiiice

The colours are organised like this for TMM- because of the odd/even scheme, the colours alternate between teams for the top 8 colours, hence it's like a broken double rainbow.

Honestly I'd just want a general review of the colors that exist. Currently we have 20, I see 0 reason to go above 20. I almost see no reason to go above 16.

If a number of colors can be agreed upon, it should be simple to go and optimize the spread of colors to make them as easy to decipher as possible.

In a game these are all just green to me and I will go:
"green is t3 air"
"my green or your green?"
"light green"
"the lighter green or the lightest green?"
"this green"
"oh just ping next time"

terrible

well, i am red/green color blind and its already a nightmare with the existing colors.
In case we change colors it would be nice to have barrier-free colors.

I hope FAF also stands for accessibility!

If someone is interested in what color blindness is or how colorblind people see colors:
https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/ (english)

Agree with everything above about not using this. We do not need 3 variations of colours, since the max players we can have is 16 anyway.

Having 3 variations of a colour will make it very difficult for people to communicate about them even for people who aren't colourblind.

I am in favor of expanding the available color list and removing the most similar colors. Based on the actual color data that I looked at for numerous colors (red value, green value, blue value, hue, brightness, saturation, position on color wheel, names of similar color hexes, etc), the two pinks (rich rose and hot pink, in klutz's list) were the most similar colors on the list. So, I proposed removing 1 of them. You can see how that went.

I don't see a rationale to keep both pinks but not add desirable colors with decently greater difference beyond resistance to change. In fact, IIRC, there are a few color pairs using current colors that are more similar than any color pairs using the new colors.

Also note that the new rainbow organization of the color list makes color similarity a lot more evident compared to the less aesthetic and more chaotic previous organization scheme.

Regarding adding colors; it is a nice QoL feature to have more colors to choose from. A LOT of people like being able to choose certain colors and don't like being stuck with certain other colors. This is true for games of all sizes; people are just more likely to get stuck with an undesired color in games with larger player counts and with smaller color lists. The recent PR added some nice colors (it had also removed some colors, but those removals were reverted).

No one argues that the current FAF color list is perfect, but there is no functional reason to expand beyond 20 colors. There is barely a functional reason to even have 20 colors beyond not making the last dude in an 8v8 sad.

If people want to optimize the current list of colors I think anybody would be for it, but every list I've seen has problems with making it way harder to communicate what is going on with teams because no generic person has 3 variations of green in their vernacular that can be explained to people that have English as their 2nd or 3rd language or just not a language at all.

@gorton

Why? We already have multiple variations of colors like green or blue, just refer to players by their name or position instead of color

Make new colours

@captainklutz
Pewter is too close to 3 other colors, lavender sky and gray
5 greens is too many, it should just be something like lime green, regular green, and a dark green
make bronze darker so it is "brown" rather than "bronze"
cider yellow should go, there's no word for it. the seraphim yellow is "mustard," lemon yellow is "yellow" then we haev orange and brown, but what word is there for "cider yellow"? we aren't going to refer to players as "cider"

if you zap 4 colors like I'm suggesting then you're down to only 21 colors which isn't that different from the original 19

Instead of "tundra green" you could make a darker version of that color that we can call "black," that gets you up to 22 colors

Maybe there can be a powder version of tyrian purple (like the difference between powder pink and hot pink).

But then get rid of "uef blue" because it's too hard to distinguish by words from "pale sky." They're both light blues.

That's 22 total colors and they're easier to distinguish

I propose we should add new colors. I understand the concerns of them being too similar. After some feedback, we definitely want to avoid having too many colors that will become an annoyance for our players.

Here is my idea of what colors should be added/changed. The biggest focus on this color scheme is the lack of similarity between the colors / visibility.

Also @Uveso, sadly, being accessible isn't a possibility since either we'll run into very similar colors everyone can see or we can have different colors that the color blind cannot differentiate. I'm not sure how we could balance both issues (we would need at least 16 different colors and I'm not sure which colors would work for every color blind person since there are different types of color blind)

@zeldafanboy said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

@gorton

Why? We already have multiple variations of colors like green or blue, just refer to players by their name or position instead of color

Plenty of maps where you can't refer to position and plenty of names that aren't easy to refer to. Not to mention most of the time if you refer to a name you need to cross reference it with color or hover over the color on the map to see where the guy named is.

Also, again, no one says the current FAF colors are awesome and perfect. It not being perfect is not a justification to extend the problem.

I think we should approach this from getting names for the colors first and then see how many we get, instead of making color variations without regard how you would refer to them in game.
Colors that come to my mind are: blue, teal, purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, white. Using "dark" as a qualifier gives us 18 colors total. (dark white is grey and dark orange could be brown)
So unless you have ideas for additional color names that people that know english only as second language would use intuitively, I think we should limit us to 18 colors.

I'd prefer reducing to 16 and focusing on better contrast between them than adding new colours. The downside of someone having only 1 colour to choose in an 8v8 game feels outweighed by the issue of not being able to easily tell apart or easily refer to very similar colours.

@maudlin27 I'm pretty sure we can have both. I do think it sucks having so little colors to choose from.

The default colors are bad enough with my colorblindness but with the new list of colors half of those colors have one or two or three others that I struggle to differentiate.

I don't think these should be added and the PR should be reversed.

There is a compromise: make a ranked UI/Sim mod that does nothing but add colors and let the players choose whether to play with it or not.

I can only speak for me personally but adding these new colors is making playing the game worse due to my bad eyesight.

I think currently people are agreeing more to not add more colors. I think instead of adding (which would have to be lighter/saturated variants to avoid being too similar) we can actually remove 2 shades of green and adjust some colors so visualization is better.

I think we could all agree that the CURRENT color scheme is bad because it offers alot of greens and it's quite confusing

Yes, that is in the CURRENT client. So, I believe we should add more colors. Otherwise, I hope we can all agree that we don't need 4 shades of green.