Item Squish; is it really coming?

[Thyranne]

That has absolutely nothing to do with why it will, at some point in the game's future, be necessary.

---------- Post added 2013-02-26 at 11:54 AM ----------



Of course they did. You were doing one calculation. The difference would fractions of fractions of a second.

But multiply it out across millions of calculations every second and those normally insignificant differences begin to add up.

I did a for from 1 to 999999999 and that was in my dual core computer.

And all those tests in Pascal didn't bring the exact the result. Some would take 514ms (lowest I found) and 550ms (highest). Both LongInt (32 bits) and Integer (16 bits) were always between 514 and 550 (by the way, it was LongInt that got 514ms).

[Sj]

Why just item levels? Why not squish player levels too?

Some Pros:

• Get new spells and talents more often
• Wider selection of dungeons while leveling
• Slows down exponential growth of gear levels
• Less of a spread on leveling players
• Gaining a level feels special again

Some Cons:

• Initial adjustment to feeling weaker
• Probable bad publicity
• Leveling would feel longer (assuming they made it take the same amount of time as it does now)
• Possible negative impact on soloability
• A lot of work to do so

Cons probably outweigh the pros, but it's an interesting thought.

[Gurbz]

Why just item levels? Why not squish player levels too?

Some Pros:

• Get new spells and talents more often
• Wider selection of dungeons while leveling
• Slows down exponential growth of gear levels
• Less of a spread on leveling players
• Gaining a level feels special again

Some Cons:

• Initial adjustment to feeling weaker
• Probable bad publicity
• Leveling would feel longer (assuming they made it take the same amount of time as it does now)
• Possible negative impact on soloability
• A lot of work to do so

Cons probably outweigh the pros, but it's an interesting thought.

Haha I want Blizzard to propose this just to watch the internet explode and burn from the unleashed nerdrage.

[Darmalus]

Why just item levels? Why not squish player levels too?

Some Pros:

• Get new spells and talents more often
• Wider selection of dungeons while leveling
• Slows down exponential growth of gear levels
• Less of a spread on leveling players
• Gaining a level feels special again

Some Cons:

• Initial adjustment to feeling weaker
• Probable bad publicity
• Leveling would feel longer (assuming they made it take the same amount of time as it does now)
• Possible negative impact on soloability
• A lot of work to do so

Cons probably outweigh the pros, but it's an interesting thought.

Doing both at the same time would probably be best, but also runs the risk of the shock driving away players by making it seem like a "new game" that they didn't want.

Wow suffers from level bloat. It has 90 levels, but you could easily squish that down to 30 where every level actually meant something. Lots of levels are empty, you level up, nothing happens. No new abilities, talents, skills, anything.

It would probably be best to drop the whole squish idea and just make the default UI format numbers better. Maybe have a "standard" and "precise" setting where standard says you did a 1,230k crit, and precise says you did a 1,230,423 damage crit. Just adjust it so it never displays more than 4 digits or less than 2 (with the right scale suffix) and it should feel fine.

[Kingoomieiii]

Numbers are numbers; 1 million is no more ridiculous than 1.

That's not how computers see it. Blizzard's server specs are going to have to go up if every HP and damage value in the game has to be changed over to bigint.

As a temporary stopgap, they either need to add some damn commas to the FCT, or actually start abbreviating it.

---------- Post added 2013-02-26 at 03:47 PM ----------

Just tested in Pascal and Java. Integer + Integer and LongInt + LongInt took the same amount of time (in Pascal)

Depending on how you ran that (JIT for example), you already saw all the overhead you were going to, leaving the numbers mostly meaningless.

I'd bet money Blizzard's internal software is written a little closer to hardware than that.

[Thyranne]

That's not how computers see it. Blizzard's server specs are going to have to go up if every HP and damage value in the game has to be changed over to bigint.

As a temporary stopgap, they either need to add some damn commas to the FCT, or actually start abbreviating it.

If both use the same data type then there is 0 difference. Anyway you are seing it like it was made in Java

Depending on how you ran that (JIT for example), you already saw all the overhead you were going to, leaving the numbers mostly meaningless.

I'd bet money Blizzard's internal software is written a little closer to hardware than that.

It's fine because most of my tests were made in Pascal and as far as I know there is no such thing like JIT for it.

[Conscious]

If the item squish does hit next expansion, something tells me it'll be the last expansion.

[Kingoomieiii]

It's fine because most of my tests were made in Pascal and as far as I know there is no such thing like JIT for it.

514ms is a crazy figure for individual calculations, you're looking at major overhead.

[Yuuki Asuna]

I can see it happening next expansion. Wouldn't it be silly for someone to say, "Wow!!!! THAT N00B HAS 1,230,445 DPS!! He should be hitting 3,000,000 AT LEAST!" Sadly...I can see that happening and...well...eventually people are not going to know what is a good dps number because the numbers would be so high. Yes, veteran players will know, but c'mon. If I was a new player and was hitting 1,000,000 dps I would be freaking out. Then someone coming along and saying that's 'too' low...that just seems...weird. On the scale the game is going, we'll see 10,000,000 dps eventually. If they scale it down like they said, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing 10-20k dps again.

[Sj]

Haha I want Blizzard to propose this just to watch the internet explode and burn from the unleashed nerdrage.

It'd be something. Better have your sunglasses ready if they do.

Doing both at the same time would probably be best, but also runs the risk of the shock driving away players by making it seem like a "new game" that they didn't want.

Wow suffers from level bloat. It has 90 levels, but you could easily squish that down to 30 where every level actually meant something. Lots of levels are empty, you level up, nothing happens. No new abilities, talents, skills, anything.

It would probably be best to drop the whole squish idea and just make the default UI format numbers better. Maybe have a "standard" and "precise" setting where standard says you did a 1,230k crit, and precise says you did a 1,230,423 damage crit. Just adjust it so it never displays more than 4 digits or less than 2 (with the right scale suffix) and it should feel fine.

I agree with the level bloat (items and players), but just tweaking the numbers to be "smaller" doesn't change the fact that we've reached exponential growth. Yes this is because of them not planning ahead for hard mode/heroic gear. It's not going to fix anything to just move the decimals a few places and wait for it to crop up again in a couple expansions. They need a plan for the long term. Before you scoff at me for "long term" keep in mind that games like Everquest (just released 19th expansion) and Anarchy Online (last patch was 18.5) have been pumping out expansions for over a decade now, so it's very possible that WoW could too.

[Thyranne]

514ms is a crazy figure for individual calculations, you're looking at major overhead.

This is the basic algorithm (spelling?):

a, b, c, i : integer;
a = 0;
b = 0;
for i = 0 to 999999999 do
begin
a = a + 1;
b = b + 1;
c = a + b;
end

{in before: YOU CHANGED THE VALUE OF A VARIABLE WITHOUT USING := THIS IS NOT PASCAL!!!!}

514ms to do 999999999 * 4 operations is far from crazy. Maybe if I had used an asm block...

[Darmalus]

I agree with the level bloat (items and players), but just tweaking the numbers to be "smaller" doesn't change the fact that we've reached exponential growth. Yes this is because of them not planning ahead for hard mode/heroic gear. It's not going to fix anything to just move the decimals a few places and wait for it to crop up again in a couple expansions. They need a plan for the long term. Before you scoff at me for "long term" keep in mind that games like Everquest (just released 19th expansion) and Anarchy Online (last patch was 18.5) have been pumping out expansions for over a decade now, so it's very possible that WoW could too.

I was under the impression that they did plan for exponential increases with each expansion, just that hard mode/heroic gear put them ahead of schedule. So we are, gear wise, probably in expansion 8 or 9 in the original plan.

We also can't ignore that gear is progression, Blues have said it themselves. So if 85-90 was ilvl 372-440 (where quest gear stopped), then raiders in ilvl 500+ are effectively level 94! Gearing is pretty crazy when you think about it, specially if you back track, we must be near level 200 on the vanilla scale by now.

[Sj]

I was under the impression that they did plan for exponential increases with each expansion, just that hard mode/heroic gear put them ahead of schedule. So we are, gear wise, probably in expansion 8 or 9 in the original plan.

We also can't ignore that gear is progression, Blues have said it themselves. So if 85-90 was ilvl 372-440 (where quest gear stopped), then raiders in ilvl 500+ are effectively level 94! Gearing is pretty crazy when you think about it, specially if you back track, we must be near level 200 on the vanilla scale by now.

You nailed it. I think the main problem is with the number of player levels stretching that growth out so far that we get to the explosive growth entirely too fast.

[Viertel]

Yeah, the whole reason they made the margin between expansions so big is because people were able to steamroll through new content with old-expansion gear, a good example of this is guilds fully clearing wrath naxx in T6 gear not long after release iirc.

Newflash: That was intended. Blizzard even stated so before the expansion was launched: the entry raid tier was designed so that people could use their T6.5 gear to go through Naxxramas and wouldn't have to bother with doing the 5 man heroics. That was the entire *PURPOSE* for why Naxxramas was so easy in comparison to Karazhan.

As far as the item squish/level bloat/etc. it's a part of the monster of WoW. Frankly, WoW's appeal is that you actually *DO* end up becoming visibly stronger with upgrades and patches and that's not something you see in other MMOs; most other MMOs you actually need to post-combat parse that shit to see any difference made and it gives the illusion that you aren't progressing at all because they want to keep the numbers "small".

Plus, as someone already mentioned, smaller numbers are harder to balance and theorycraft. Usually, if you resort to keeping numbers small (i.e. LotRO, FFXI) you end up using floor() a shitton in your game calculations to get rid of decimals which really *DOES* destroy a lot of the growth potentional in gear.

[Asmekiel]

I can see it happening next expansion. Wouldn't it be silly for someone to say, "Wow!!!! THAT N00B HAS 1,230,445 DPS!! He should be hitting 3,000,000 AT LEAST!" Sadly...I can see that happening and...well...eventually people are not going to know what is a good dps number because the numbers would be so high. Yes, veteran players will know, but c'mon. If I was a new player and was hitting 1,000,000 dps I would be freaking out. Then someone coming along and saying that's 'too' low...that just seems...weird. On the scale the game is going, we'll see 10,000,000 dps eventually. If they scale it down like they said, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing 10-20k dps again.

New players don't know what's good or bad. If I was a new player and would be told that me doing 1M DPS isn't all that good, I would try to perform better. It wouldn't be weird at all, since I wouldn't have a clue what's good and what not.

[Zokudu]

My issue is the numbers are losing meaning. When I see item upgrades it's a 4 or 8 ilvl bump on a piece with almost 500 ilvl. Who cares at the point? Whoop de do I'm getting 40 aditional agility, again who cares when I have 10,000 already?

[Ferrouswheel]

I can't tell if everyone is joking around or if y'all really just completely just don't get this and have had your minds boggled. Now mobs have what like 2088k health and we do like 100k dmg in attacks. It all just percentages. And they would be reducing everything in the squish, so now on mobs our attacks do like 1% of its health or 2% or whatever, and after the squish our attacks would still do the same 1 or 2% Heals will still bring our health up the same % as always. You people are treating this like its quantum rocket science, when all it is is just to make things look neater, literally ABSOLUTELY NOTHING will change gameplay wise other than smaller numbers THAT ARE STILL THE SAME PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL HEALTH FROM BEFORE.

Also

This is the dumbest WoW related thing I have ever heard. Ever. Gameplay exactly the same, but smaller numbers = I QUIT! F YO FACE BLIZZ! I CANT STAND STILL DOING THE SAME DMG, YOU BROKETHEGAMEOMGBBQWTFHAXZZZZZZ!!!!!

That's quite adorable considering you have NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. It's not just a flat percentage to lower numbers, it would remove ALL LOW LEVEL RAID AND DUNGEON SOLOING. ALL SOLO MOUNT/GEAR FARMING. Fucking dumbass.

[Synstir]

I am really surprised the item squish didn't go through. It is a little out of control right now and is only going to get worse as item levels keep rising.

Can you explain why big numbers are a problem please?
As I don't have a clue why the numbers are an issue at all....... What does it matter how big the numbers get?

[And not the technical computerstuff pls as the computers have really no problem with these numbers nor will they have an issue with biggerr numbers]

[ablib]

It's not surprising so see so many people not understand math (the people against the item squish).

---------- Post added 2013-02-27 at 02:23 AM ----------

Can you explain why big numbers are a problem please?
As I don't have a clue why the numbers are an issue at all....... What does it matter how big the numbers get?

[And not the technical computerstuff pls as the computers have really no problem with these numbers nor will they have an issue with biggerr numbers]

Actually the technical computer stuff is the reason the squish is inevitable someday.

[Noxina]

Why not just make an addOn to fix it?
Or an option in the interface menu to toggle it on/off, so people can do what they want to.

If someone wants smaller numbers, just hit that button and all your numbers gets divided by 10. So when you hit 100,000 you'll only see a number of 10,000. For instance.
Or have an addon that simply put "K", "M" and "B" behind; 100,000 = 100k, 1,000,000 = 1M, 1,000,000,000 = 1B.
And all problems are solved.