Why is blizzard hiding more and more numbers from players

[Jerot]

Isn't it weird that some people here say that "blizzard hides numbers so i can't figure out shit by myself without referring to 3rd party website", while most of they problem are easily fixed by figuring out yourself via combatlog and testing dummy. Or, sometimes, simply equipping/unequipping gear.
Seriously, if you are not sure if weapon affects feral druids, just shft in - log your white attacks for 30 seconds, unequip weapon, attack for 30 more seconds and compare numbers.
There are ways to figure it out, they are just not your your face all the time and you need to do little of doing stuff to get results

Theres zero reason that information shouldn't be available to the player. If all the interactions and coefficients are hidden you aren't going to learn anything meaningful from target dummy tests. Maybe you can get a vague feeling X is better than Y, but you won't know exactly why. Okay, you have learned you do 93% less dps when you don't have your Crit/Haste weapon on, which stat is more important? How much did your mainstat contribute to the damage? Its such a dumb backwards way to do things, and why?

It doesn't have to be directly on the tooltip, or it can be hidden with a toggle, but its important to know. You can test everything individually if you want to waste your time doing work many have done before you, the whole reason those websites exist.

Look at RPG roots, we had dice, a sheet with some numbers on it, and we had to imagine all the action going on. Now you want the opposite? Look at all the pretty action, ignore the numbers?

[Aeula]

You also can't see Rep gained for paragon reps.

[Deleted]

Because they believe new blood into the game are composed by idiots who don't like to use their brain? See no reason in why they removed it, the ones who found it interested used it and us scrubs who didn't care survived anyways.

[corebit]

Other than WoW and MMOs are there other games where players are as obsessed by seeing all the numbers and coefficients?

[Deleted]

Isn't it weird that some people here say that "blizzard hides numbers so i can't figure out shit by myself without referring to 3rd party website", while most of they problem are easily fixed by figuring out yourself via combatlog and testing dummy. Or, sometimes, simply equipping/unequipping gear.
Seriously, if you are not sure if weapon affects feral druids, just shft in - log your white attacks for 30 seconds, unequip weapon, attack for 30 more seconds and compare numbers.
There are ways to figure it out, they are just not your your face all the time and you need to do little of doing stuff to get results

You can put a positive spin on anything if you truly try. Fact on the matter is the statement "Both are pretty minor ones but I have to wonder, if it was never a problem before it's pretty alarming if a company manages to take steps back to make it a problem, for no real reason" still stands. Having to rely on 3rd party website isn't a good design, especially when that need didn't exist in the last 10 years. Neither is having to test every mundane thing possible. I mean why explain ANY stat at all, you can just go figure it out yourself or google it. In fact why explain how skills work to begin with? Just remove tooltips altogether, go figure it out, doing stuff is great right?

I understand you have invested a lot of time and money in this game which makes you feel slightly personally insulted when someone criticizes the company, but there are things that they, objectively speaking, handle very poorly, and this is one of them. Another example would be the new nameplates which plain lack useful functions the previous ones had, for no real reason

[Deleted]

You also can't see Rep gained for paragon reps.

Did you try mousing over the bag on the end of the rep bar? :P

[Charge me Doctor]

Theres zero reason that information shouldn't be available to the player. If all the interactions and coefficients are hidden you aren't going to learn anything meaningful from target dummy tests. Maybe you can get a vague feeling X is better than Y, but you won't know exactly why. Okay, you have learned you do 93% less dps when you don't have your Crit/Haste weapon on, which stat is more important? How much did your mainstat contribute to the damage? Its such a dumb backwards way to do things, and why?

It doesn't have to be directly on the tooltip, or it can be hidden with a toggle, but its important to know. You can test everything individually if you want to waste your time doing work many have done before you, the whole reason those websites exist.

Look at RPG roots, we had dice, a sheet with some numbers on it, and we had to imagine all the action going on. Now you want the opposite? Look at all the pretty action, ignore the numbers?

It's not hidden, it's there, you have an option of getting information yourself, or go to a database and read it there. You don't need this info on tooltips, go open a simcraft and calculate stat weights yourself (yeah, to find what actually is better for you requires such powerful tools as simcraft, not some sort of napkin math).
You have exactly the same system you describe in "RPG roots", you have a sheet and it's available to you, you want your "sheet" to be in "imaginable action" part, which is fucking weird.

Asking devs to put all the info in cut chunks before player so he can just consume them without even thinking is so weird with for me, i just can't believe that people advocate that.
I don't want blizzard to tell me which stat is best. I don't want them to bloat tooltips with irrelevant data (because i don't use tooltips to calculate shit, i use database and spreadsheet). I don't want people blindly follow what blizzard says them to do (aka, green arrow on a piece of gear that is higher ilvl than your current equipped, or "haste is your best stat! stack in up!"). It only takes away from the game.

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Strange that people complain now.

I mean, we always had to go to outside websites, because the game does a less than optimal job at telling you things. That is why we have "Ask Mr Robot" or "Icy veins". For example the game doesn't tell me what my preferred secondary stat should be.

And it shouldn't, it takes away complexity from the game. Database websites, simcraft-like tools they exist because game became more complex and there is no clear answer to these things. I'll go equip me 905 crit/haste ring, it shoots me way over haste breakpoint and excessive 1k haste is weighted WAY less than 1k crit i'll get from 885 ring, with low amount of haste on it, which brings me just above a haste breakpoint. This min-maxing can't (and shouldn't) be done via tooltips or on character screen (read: these calculations should be done by player, not blizzard).

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Having to rely on 3rd party website isn't a good design, especially when that need didn't exist in the last 10 years. Neither is having to test every mundane thing possible.

And i'm just highlighting this and reiterate something i constantly keep saying to everyone on these forums - it happened because game was shit easy 10 years ago, you barely needed to consider any numbers to do good, now you have to screw simcraft every time you get a possible upgrade

[Ribesal]

You are irrationally upset over a change which did nothing to the functionality of the game and simply makes the game more comprehensible to players for whom the information is not relevant. Of all the relevant things you can bitch at Blizzard about, this is about as shallow as you can get.

If we continue this "simplification" outside of WoW: Do you want to go to a store and see that the items you wanna buy cost a slightly, medium, average, normal, vast, high, huge, or extremely amount of money? Do you want to go to the cash register and hear "a big pile of money, please"? I'm sure you want to see and hear the actual numbers.
Yes, there are games that work without displaying any numbers, but WoW isn't such a game. It's too complicated to NOT show numbers.
If we get rid of berserk timers and abilities with the possibility to kill instantly if you haven't used the right ability before hand, then WoW would probably work without numbers, but would also be very very boring.

Advanced tooltips is and has always been an option as far back as I can remember, unless they removed it in recent patches. That turns on the more "mathy" tooltips.

Hmm... yes there was one years ago, but can't find it anymore. Where is it? Or whats the name of the CVar for it?

[Polybius]

As much as I dislike OP's constant nagging, they have a point. If we apply it to gear:

Some Item
Binds when picked up
Somewhere
A lot of Armor
+Greater Agility
+Slight Critical Strike
+Some Haste
+Some Mastery


In my case... I can't tell if certain speed increases stack, because there aren't any percentages to meter movement speed.

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Recently, the only game that actually needed a simplified sheet was Wildstar. The Everquest series comes to mind but that was long ago.

This is just an insult to our intelligence.

[Vzz]

Precise numbers are in fact part of a RPG game. Good thing would be add advanced mode UI option where all numbers are displayed for those who love to Theory Craft.

[Zka]

Install an addon that displays your precious numbers.
Obviously there is a reason they hid them, for example to make the game more accessible, more simple for fresh players.

[Deleted]

Install an addon that displays your precious numbers.
Obviously there is a reason they hid them, for example to make the game more accessible, more simple for fresh players.

Giving the option would be nice.

[Charge me Doctor]

In my case... I can't tell if certain speed increases stack, because there aren't any percentages to meter movement speed.

/script print("Current speed: %d%%", GetUnitSpeed("player") / 7 * 100) should work, you can tell your movement speed, you just need to be a little smarter about it

[Zka]

Giving the option would be nice.

Yes, definitely.

[Charge me Doctor]

As much as I dislike OP's constant nagging, they have a point. If we apply it to gear:

Some Item
Binds when picked up
Somewhere
A lot of Armor
+Greater Agility
+Slight Critical Strike
+Some Haste
+Some Mastery

Actually it's more like
Some Item
Binds when picked up
Somewhere
Armour
+Agility
+Staimina
+Critical Strike
+Haste
or in some cases

Some Item
Binds when picked up
Somewhere
Armour
+Agility
+Staimina
+less Critical Strike
+more Haste

[Super Kami Dende]

it's almost as if you could have spent the time you have in this thread downloading just 1 or 2 addons that give you 10x the numbers the base does.

WOW!

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You also can't see Rep gained for paragon reps.

try using your mouse and put the little arrow on the screen over the bag. I mean, reasons such as yours are why Blizzard simplified the stats.

[Aeula]

Did you try mousing over the bag on the end of the rep bar? :P

I was referring to the message when you earn Rep.

[Deleted]

/script print("Current speed: %d%%", GetUnitSpeed("player") / 7 * 100) should work, you can tell your movement speed, you just need to be a little smarter about it

How is that better than just pressing C to look at your character and the STATS PANEL (what it should be for, but they just remove the data for unknown reasons).
Why does it matter if it's there or not? If you don't care about it just don't look at it? But people that do care about it can't look at it, because it's not there anymore.

Why not make it so that there is an option to hide it and make that default? That way both sides get what they want.

If WoW continues on this path gear will start to look like this...:



Because why bother putting the exact stats on it? "Just datamine it and look it up in a database" or "It's not that important anyway"

It's part of UX (User Experience). The vast majority of players do not actually do any form of theorycrafting or mathematics to determine player power. Simplifying tooltips to be more vague makes it easier to intuitively understand what's going on.

"Slightly increases stamina" is more understandable to the average player than "Increases stamina by 0.5%".

The important information is still there for the theorycrafters, and the average Joe can read these tooltips and get a semblance of what is good.

Simplifying does not make it easier to understand because you don't know the values.

"Slightly" can mean anything.... 1%? 10%? 5%?

What else are they going to change? Tooltip from heals? Potions? Flasks? Food?





How is that useful information? Dumbing down the game isn't a good thing... the whole game is about numbers (levels, hp, mana, dps, hps, ilvl, stats like haste/crit etc etc) and getting stronger (a sense of progression) and if you remove that you might as well remove all the numbers. Just make everything into bars (health/mana bar) without numbers, max level is 1 because why not? Give all the skills right away since you only have 4 skills left now (and levels are just a number so they removed that too). Gear doesn't show stats either, only ilvl and higher is always better (except that it isn't, just like now in-game).

I for one like complexity since it adds depth to the game, you have to figure out what's best and there is almost always a way to better your character. If they dumb down everything and straight up remove stuff they might as well take the game offline. It's an MMORPG after all.

[Girrag]

If you hide numbers then you can rig them. That's an ultimate goal I think.

[Charge me Doctor]

How is that better than just pressing C to look at your character and the STATS PANEL (what it should be for, but they just remove the data for unknown reasons).
Why does it matter if it's there or not? If you don't care about it just don't look at it? But people that do care about it can't look at it, because it's not there anymore.

Why not make it so that there is an option to hide it and make that default? That way both sides get what they want.

If WoW continues on this path gear will start to look like this...:



Because why bother putting the exact stats on it? "Just datamine it and look it up in a database" or "It's not that important anyway"



Simplifying does not make it easier to understand because you don't know the values.

"Slightly" can mean anything.... 1%? 10%? 5%?

What else are they going to change? Tooltip from heals? Potions? Flasks? Food?





How is that useful information? Dumbing down the game isn't a good thing... the whole game is about numbers (levels, hp, mana, dps, hps, ilvl, stats like haste/crit etc etc) and getting stronger (a sense of progression) and if you remove that you might as well remove all the numbers. Just make everything into bars (health/mana bar) without numbers, max level is 1 because why not? Give all the skills right away since you only have 4 skills left now (and levels are just a number so they removed that too). Gear doesn't show stats either, only ilvl and higher is always better (except that it isn't, just like now in-game).

I for one like complexity since it adds depth to the game, you have to figure out what's best and there is almost always a way to better your character. If they dumb down everything and straight up remove stuff they might as well take the game offline. It's an MMORPG after all.

No it won't, you lost an argument and started strawmaning shit. Numbers are there. There are ways to get them. People complain that blizzard don't put information right into their brains so they won't even have to think about anything, just like those who google "stat weights for 7.2 MM hunter" right now and ram first strings they found into their pawn and forget about them until the end of a patch.

And before your blood pressure went up again - i fully agree that movement speed should be of character stat screen. Frankly, mine character screen still shows it, because i am decent player and know how to make it happen.