The big numbers problem

[Deleted]

You do realize this would completely kill raiding as it is now, only making it fun to whichever part of the spectrum is at that level?

If on Mythic was kept, raiding would be for only small portion of players.
If only HC, then hardcore players would lose their point of playing the game as it would be too easy for them and probably still too hard (at least initially) for casual F&F guilds, which are quite numerous.
If only normal was kept, Mythic players would probably quit at the spot, and HC players would be done in 1-2 months.

If they stick to what they did in second half of HFC bosses after nerf (+1 ability per difficulty) then big gear gap should not be necessary - tuning damage for lesser gear gaps should be no problem, and the difficulty would not be composed of larger numbers (both incoming and outgoing) but in the fact that there's more stuff to manage.

Raiding in TBC was fine. Raiding in WOTLK was fine. There are ways to motivate hardcore players. Hard-Modes anyone? Mimiron... do not press that button.

And frankly spoken who the fuck cares about hardcore raider...0.x % of players. All known guilds disbanded anyways. So wayne? This game was never intendes to be for hardcore players.

Make 2 difficulties. 1 between HC and Mythic... harder to the end. And 1 Storymode with significantly worse loot.

Nobody needs normal. Nobody needs LFR. And nobody needs 4 difficulties.

We had fun raiding in TBC and WOTLK...much more than we had in the later expansions.

WOD had 1 fun raid, the first one. Because there we had no fucking scaling issues and the imperator was hard but doable... everything afterwards was plain bullshit. Hell you heal Archimonde Mythic with 2 Healer... this is even easier than Garrosh after final nerf.

Every noob and his mom (if they have a guild) can kill every Mythic boss because of this scaling crap (Set boni, trinkets, ilvl boost).

[Kryos]

And frankly spoken who the fuck cares about hardcore raider...0.x % of players. All known guilds disbanded anyways. So wayne? This game was never intendes to be for hardcore players.

Except that Blizzard always, from the start of vanilla, wanted people to go raiding and go from easy raids to harder raids. Many didn't, but Blizzard wanted them to try and tried everything to make people try raiding. They believe that the challenge and the social experience of raiding is where WoW shines and not the other content (because to be honest, other MMORPGs also offer nice content outside of raiding).

Listen to this blizzcon raid panel from 2005:

That's 11 years ago and pretty much all changes are done to make everybody experience raiding. When they finally concluded that many people just don't have the time to raid, they introduces LFR so people would at least see the raid encounters once.

"But Kryos, they just wanted you to join it and take part, not to be hardcore and really work for your loot!"
Well, listen to this 2 years later:

"welfare Arena epics" "this panel is for people who actual go out there an EARN their epics" - he is talking about BC introducing WotlK ...

But they learned during WolK, that welfare and easy epics is what the majority loves and supports and plays and difficult content is for a smaller fraction of players. So they added additional difficulty levels an scaling raids. So everybody can find the difficulty level he is comfortable with.

Every noob and his mom (if they have a guild) can kill every Mythic boss because of this scaling crap (Set boni, trinkets, ilvl boost).

Nonsense. The kill numbers prove you wrong.

[tehdef]

You people need to get some IT education. Squishes are a matter of technical issue and not your butthurt feeling about number being too high.

WoWs engine uses 32-bit signed int, so the number is 2147483647.

NOPE, wrong. They switched to 64-bit awhile ago and they are no longer bound to a 10 digit number. You were on the right track though, because that's why Garrosh had to reset his HP like 4 times in the fight because they capped his HP.

I can confirm this because they also changed the gold cap.

It was 214,748g 36g 46c, which as you can see is 1 less than the max integer value. The new gold cap is 999,999.

[Adramelch]

NOPE, wrong. They switched to 64-bit awhile ago and they are no longer bound to a 10 digit number. You were on the right track though, because that's why Garrosh had to reset his HP like 4 times in the fight because they capped his HP.

I can confirm this because they also changed the gold cap.

It was 214,748g 36g 46c, which as you can see is 1 less than the max integer value. The new gold cap is 999,999.

That happened in Cata and is probably irrelevant (given that for all we know they were still using 32-bit in MoP) as I assume they just changed the way gold, silver and copper are stored.

[Deleted]

They are slowing it down. Secondary stats are going to scale up much slower in Legion. That should help a bit.

Your "at the end of MoP" damage numbers are from after the stat squish. They were doing 400k+ beforehand. So, while they did indeed increase a lot going from post-squish 90 to 100, they still haven't gotten close to the numbers they were at the end of MoP, where it was really starting to become an issue. Although another ten-fold increase could happen, that would be at the end of the expansion again, and Blizzard has said they're willing to continue doing squishes whenever it becomes necessary.

You cannot slow aynthing down when you continue to have 4 levels of gear for every single tier. That is the problem and it won't get fixed.

[Hottage]

And they could double that by making them unsigned. There is no need to express hit points, spell or ability damage as a negative number.

How do you think healing is expressed?

[Lumineus]

They upped the gold cap long before MoP though, and still had to mod bosses with healing phases to go above 2B health. I think they either just changed gold to a floating point expression, or split silver and copper off into separate fields and added an OODB subroutine in the table to handle the exchange.

[Thelxi]

I don't think Blizzard really considers it a problem. Just recently in D3 they attempted to address this "problem" where damage is in the billions, and we ended up with a stream of weird numbers where 10 billion and 100 million look very similar. I don't feel they are really aware of the problem and how to best fix it.

[Kryos]

That happened in Cata and is probably irrelevant (given that for all we know they were still using 32-bit in MoP) as I assume they just changed the way gold, silver and copper are stored.

Seems they just use a 64bit signed integer now. So 922,337,203,685,477g58s08c (922 trillion) would be possible but they capped at 999k because of visual errors if you add another digit (digits overlapping the fields that show the money).

I conclude this from this bug in the WoW armory app that showed several trillion gold on a bugged character:
http://i.imgur.com/4nrFWqR.jpg

[Adramelch]

Given that this is a bug in the WoW armory app and not something that exists in-game, that conclusion feels a bit far-fetched to be honest.

But regardless of whether your assumption is right or wrong, that doesn't change the fact that they were using 32-bit numbers for health values as soon as the end of MoP, so the poster that I quoted coming and saying something like "NOPE, wrong they use 64-bit now" and basing it on a change that happened at the start of Cata, is off.

[ThePromise110]

They already were massively inflated in WOD. People were doing about 15-20k on Garrosh mythic after the squish at end of MOP. On Archi the top guys are doing around 150k now, that's 10X the dps. If there's a similar growth going to legion, they'll be doing over 1 million dps.

Gear inflation is a real problem for them, they need to slow it down. It's hard to make a raid where the bosses are compelling when you enter it at 700 ilvl and still compelling after 3 months when you're 725. Also there's the need for a stat squish every 5 minutes.

Well this is what happens when you think your player-base is only after shinies. I've talked about it before in other places, but only a small subset of raiders actually raid primarily for the gear. For most the gear is a means to an end or a reward for doing something awesome, not the reason people go into the raid to begin with. But when you get that wrong (and you decide to cut a raid tier and make BRF its own tier) then your ilevels get out of control very quickly.

[Wildmoon]

Raiding in TBC was fine. Raiding in WOTLK was fine. There are ways to motivate hardcore players. Hard-Modes anyone? Mimiron... do not press that button.

And frankly spoken who the fuck cares about hardcore raider...0.x % of players. All known guilds disbanded anyways. So wayne? This game was never intendes to be for hardcore players.

Make 2 difficulties. 1 between HC and Mythic... harder to the end. And 1 Storymode with significantly worse loot.

Nobody needs normal. Nobody needs LFR. And nobody needs 4 difficulties.

We had fun raiding in TBC and WOTLK...much more than we had in the later expansions.

WOD had 1 fun raid, the first one. Because there we had no fucking scaling issues and the imperator was hard but doable... everything afterwards was plain bullshit. Hell you heal Archimonde Mythic with 2 Healer... this is even easier than Garrosh after final nerf.

Every noob and his mom (if they have a guild) can kill every Mythic boss because of this scaling crap (Set boni, trinkets, ilvl boost).

Current Heroic raiding is my preferred difficulty. WotLK normal was too easy and its heroic was too hard(before stacking buff).

[HumbleDuck]

I have no clue how computers work, but wouldn't rounding up by a factor of 1000 fix the problem? I mean acting on 3000 as if it was 3 and add a K in front of the output.

[Raiju]

I have no clue how computers work, but wouldn't rounding up by a factor of 1000 fix the problem? I mean acting on 3000 as if it was 3 and add a K in front of the output.

Then every level 1 is going to hit for 1000.

[Krom2040]

There are many ways to resolve issues associated with dealing with large numbers. It's not like numbers larger than 2^32 just didn't exist in computing before 64-bit processors were invented. We just don't know how exactly Blizzard chose to deal with the issue.

[Kryos]

I have no clue how computers work, but wouldn't rounding up by a factor of 1000 fix the problem? I mean acting on 3000 as if it was 3 and add a K in front of the output.

Then 1000 would be the minimum for everything. 1000 copper is the minimum gold. 1000 dmg is the minimum dmg. 1000 hp is the minimum hp and the minimum increase is also 1000. So you can't have 1239 dmg. Only 1000, 2000, 3000 and so on.

- - - Updated - - -

There are many ways to resolve issues associated with dealing with large numbers. It's not like numbers larger than 2^32 just didn't exist in computing before 64-bit processors were invented. We just don't know how exactly Blizzard chose to deal with the issue.

Yes, you need to assign two or more 32 bit integers for a single object. They didn't. They can replace the 32 bit unsigned interger with 64 bit ones, that would be pretty easy. Or they need to rewrite the code that all items/dmg numbers are using several 32 bit integers. That would also cause a decrease in performance because you use a library to break the numbers up and store them internally as multiple machine word sized (i.e 32-bit) numbers. The standard IEEE 754 defines rules for encoding numbers larger than 2^32.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating_point

So there are several ways to fix it, but most would cost too much recoding and time. I think making WoW a 64bit-only game with 64 bit signed integers instread of 32 bit signed integers would be the easier solution. All processors since the Opteron in 2003 and the intel Pentium 4 Prescott (the latter editions) has 64bit instruction set and will all run 64bit windows.

WoW minimum requirement is a Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+ and with Legion it's Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 or AMD Phenom II X3 720. So they can run 64 bit code.

[ls-]

Yes, you need to assign two or more 32 bit integers for a single object. They didn't. They can replace the 32 bit unsigned interger with 64 bit ones, that would be pretty easy. Or they need to rewrite the code that all items/dmg numbers are using several 32 bit integers. That would also cause a decrease in performance because you use a library to break the numbers up and store them internally as multiple machine word sized (i.e 32-bit) numbers. The standard IEEE 754 defines rules for encoding numbers larger than 2^32.

You normally need two words. Overhead on integers isn't that big, I'd say, it's quite neglectable, especially in game environment. You dun need any special library, it's a simple structure and it's included in standard library, so it's a standard data type since forever.

P.S. It's like 3rd or 4th thread on this topic, and same people keep going "hurr durr 32bit engine hurr durr 2.4bln limit hurr durr wow is dead", nothing changes...

[HumbleDuck]

Then every level 1 is going to hit for 1000.

Oh, so its not possible to separate problematic combat stats ( such as health, damage, healing and ...) From other numbers?

[Raiju]

Oh, so its not possible to separate problematic combat stats ( such as health, damage, healing and ...) From other numbers?

health is a primary example of a problematic stat. damage/healing would delay the problem but honestly, no it'd be easier to go with other methods.

[Rivin]

This, along with your assumption about the numbers in legion, is extremely incorrect.

A tank walks around with 3+m hp, a dps is going to be doing likely over 1m dps towards end of expansion.

The ilvl bump between difficulties was 15 ilvl from the start. BRF was only 10 ilvls higher as highmaul because they were considered the same tier originally - I even asked why they upped the ilvl between difficulties from 13 to 15 and if it was a mistake, and they said no it was intended to make the gear increase feel significant.

In other words there was no attempt to squish item level here. To top it off, new tiers have been generally ridiculous for a long time due to the amount of difficulties and the idea that they want you to start on a previous difficulty except in the case of the bleeding edge.

That doesn't at all disprove what I said. They attempted to drop the item level jump between Highmaul and BRF and it failed because it wasn't enough power growth to motivate people to do the content. That statement comes directly from Blizzard.