Unfortunately, not all men are created equal. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some people have better eyesight. Some people have better reflexes. Some people have better precision. Some people are better at predicting enemy movement. While it may be true that you have a clinical disability, there are many people with varying degrees of disabilities that impact their gaming ability which may or may not be diagnosed. Do I allow varying degrees of model discoloration depending on the severity of the disability? See where I'm going here? The only way to make a game completely fair would be to throw a bunch of names in a hat and have it randomly select a winner, but what fun is that?
I have two key concerns here:
- What's best for the game and community as a whole?
- What's realistic?
I'm fairly certain the community as a whole wants a fair game. Can I get a show of hands for those of you who want other players running around with modified models and textures so they can see better than you? Ok, maybe there are a handful of, "I'm better than you even if you cheat, so bring it on." players, but I don't think that's really in the best interest of the community overall.
Now, what's realistic? Reviewing each individual player's disabilities and weaknesses and creating alternative versions of the game and/or content to compensate for those handicaps is not really realistic. Not only would it be a lot of work, but how am I to determine the relative visibility of a player model against a given texture for a color blind person vs. the stock models for players who aren't color blind? Their alternative textures might be more visible even with their color blindness than the stock textures for other players.
The most fair and realistic solution I see right now is this: everybody uses the same models and textures. If you have a disability, then you have a disability, and you're just going to have to learn how to play with it. As b00nlander said, there are no green models, so you won't be mixing teams up. They might be harder to see against grass textures, but the players don't have grass camo on, so you should be able to pick out the patterns of their jersey easily enough, and they'll probably be moving anyway. I've played lots of games where players are actually designed to blend in with the environment -- games like BF2 and COD2 come to mind. Even in classic Quake 2 deathmatch, everything was pretty much the same orange/yellow/brown color. You just have to learn to discern pattern and movement instead of colors.
