The great item squish is coming

[Oerba Yun Fang]

Sorry, but a core theme of RPGs is character progression through levels and new abilities. A lot of old pen and paper RPGs only had minor stat increases. Take D & D for example, +2 Mace here, +1 dagger with a fancy effect there. That's it, as far as item progression goes. Item progression is an invention of modern MMOs, to keep their customers hooked.

It's relative. You're asking to remove the stats from gear entirely, which is, again, trading one extreme for the other. That gets you nowhere. But fine, I'll humor you. A core theme of MMORPGs is that of character progression by way of levels and stats. I would suggest finding a new genre to play if you don't like that.

[b4dcrc]

However, inflation in economics is a semi-natural process. It is deflation which is ruinous and avoided like plague. But people, who don't like big numbers, are usually not good in economics either. I wonder how such people are dealing with currency even on most basic level, or are they trashing away everything which exceeds 999,99 $? If so, just send all exceeds to me, I am not "afraid" of big numbers

Im pretty sure inflation in 8 years where going from two digit numbers to numbers in the millions would be pretty unhealthy for any economy. And you can pretty easily deal with a currency where you pay lets say 20.000€ for a middle class car, that's not such a huge number, unlike with other currencys like Greece used to have where you payed billions for the same car because their money was worth shit (so is their economy btw) see where i'm going to?
And yeah ppl that support exponential inflation are surely market brokers because exponential inflation is the best thing to have in an economy /sarcasm

[Foomy]

Who the fuck cares? The ability to solo old content shouldn't stand in the way of solving one of the biggest problems of current content.

They should just get rid of the whole fucking system and make gear purely cosmetic with a few minor upgrade possibilities only affecting abilities not stats. Stats are bound to your charcter and rise when you level up. In fact, every single retarded mmo out there should get rid of this ridiculous item level bullshit.

what problems? see thyrannes post ....

[Evil Inside]

This is what you said, there is nothing about getting close to the number limit of an unsigned int, which is 18446744073709551616. We are far far away from it.

And that is if they use integer for HP

Anyway, many programming languages have ways to avoid this problem, Java has it, Pascal so I don't know why C++ wouldn't have it.

I'm fairly certain they use floating point, for boss HP anyway.

[Thyranne]

I'm fairly certain they use floating point, for boss HP anyway.

So that's not even a problem.

Ps: Damn, you quoted me before I fixed my text

[Mosotti]

This is what you said, there is nothing about getting close to the number limit of an unsigned int, which is 18446744073709551616. We are far far away from it.

And that is if they use integer for HP

Anyway, many programming languages have ways to avoid this problem, Java has it, Pascal so I don't know why C++ wouldn't have it.

Where is that? In C++ unsigned int is [0, 4294967295]

The problem is not to avoid it, the problem is that avoiding it costs memory and processing power. I assume that in WoW every fight goes through their servers, so having them compute a LOT of operations with large numbers instead of low numbers matters

[b4dcrc]

This is what you said, there is nothing about getting close to the number limit of an unsigned int, which is 18446744073709551616. We are far far away from it.

And that is if they use integer for HP.

What i ment was that by exceeding the limit they would have to use other data types and probably change some of the programming or have overflowing structures, a long int can handle 2,147,483,647 which is pretty close to where we would be 1 to 2 expansions from now. I don't know where you got the unsigned int from but as far as i know that's not the type they use, i could be wrong on this point though.

[Axelond]

Computers gets faster and faster every year and numbers gets bigger naturally and they will be able to keep up with the DPS numbers players will be doing. A squish in stats is just wrong and for it to work you need a new game. People will adjust to the new number scales and adding prefixes will help a lot to like the commas they added in MoP. I cant really care about if I am doing 1.4 tera DPS or 1.7 Giga DPS all i care about is if I can be doing 23 mega dps and I am doing 19 mega damage I am doing bad.

The only problem with is how do you display numbers on the screen. A easy option would be just have a option to simplify your damage like instead of 1000000000 make it 1000M or 1G or color code it or simply have a option to divide all numbers by 1000 or something similar. Already I can see this problem on like recount if I disabled simplify numbers because reading a 6 digit number is really hard without commas or anything but recount already have a option to simplify it to K, M and same deal again with mob healths

[Thyranne]

What i ment was that by exceeding the limit they would have to use other data types and probably change some of the programming or have overflowing structures, a long int can handle 2,147,483,647 which is pretty close to where we would be 1 to 2 expansions from now. I don't know where you got the unsigned int from but as far as i know that's not the type they use, i could be wrong on this point though.

2.147.483.647 is 32 bits. Do you honestly think that a server with thousands of connections will be 32 bits?

[MasterHamster]

We are having a huge leap this expansion between item levels for gear. If we only get one more tier in the expansion, then we'll see item levels at nearly 600 by the end of MoP if this trend continues. Gearing is currently exponential, and the next expansion would need to compensate for that, potentially bringing us into an ilevel of 700-735. I just can't see that happening, could you imagine what kind of stats would be on gear at ilvl 729?

Dunno, could a level 70 imagine what stats ilvl 500 would have?

The "numbers too high" panic dies down as soon as people hit the new max level, same old same old.

[TheOne]

Giving candy to a child only to take it away later is unethical and immoral. It should be punishable in the same way that treason is.

[Fummockelchen]

@op: nice for you to have an oppinion but wheres your PROVE? everybody can speculate...

[b4dcrc]

2.147.483.647 is 32 bits. Do you honestly think that a server with thousands of connections will be 32 bits?

I have not the slightest clue what servers they use now what servers they used 8 years ago and what upgrades they have made in between so i just assume the worst case scenario. Since this was their main reason for bringing up the item squish in the first place i'm pretty sure they must have had some reason behind it

[Thyranne]

I have not the slightest clue what servers they use now what servers they used 8 years ago and what upgrades they have made in between so i just assume the worst case scenario. Since this was their main reason for bringing up the item squish in the first place i'm pretty sure they must have had some reason behind it

I'm pretty sure they updated their servers a few years ago and sold the old servers to people so they could have a part of Warcraft history (Or maybe I'm just crazy).

[Gordon]

It's relative. You're asking to remove the stats from gear entirely, which is, again, trading one extreme for the other. That gets you nowhere.

Why does removing stats on gear getting us nowhere? It does, it gets us to the point where stat inflation doesn't matter, because it does not exist. I don't think that's too hard to understand.

But fine, I'll humor you. A core theme of MMORPGs is that of character progression by way of levels and stats. I would suggest finding a new genre to play if you don't like that.

I might just do that. Another reason I might do it, is fanboys defending retarded concepts of their favourite games because they can and not because it is reasonable.

[Aerodyne]

The problem is that the exponential nature of current scaling means that sooner or later we will end up with absolutely ridiculous numbers on everything. We're already looking at over 1000 of a primary stat on some items - just take a moment to realise how crazy that is, when only 30 levels ago, in the best gear possible you had around 300 of a primary stat on your entire character.

I think people have lost sight of what itemlevel is all about - it used to be almost directly related to character level. A level 60 would be finding level 60 item level drops, and that was level appropriate gear. However, in order to allow progression at the level cap, the item level rose above the player level, to allow an increase of stats. Given multiple tiers, this rose fairly quickly.

The problem was now that the level of the character was no longer proportionate to the gear - in TBC if they had just made all of the items the same item level and stat budget as the vanilla items, Naxx and AQ40 gear would be so powerful (still) that it would not have been replaced by any of the levelling items, and probably not even by anything in the first tier, so while an exponential model made sense at this stage, once we got to end game in TBC, and once again multiple tiers, the item level just got higher and higher and higher, and further aware from our character level.

The only way this could have been prevented is if the level cap had been increased by 60 at the start of each expansion, or there was only one tier of gear at end game, both not very good solutions. However we are now at the point where the scaling has gotten out of hand, and the gap between tiers and expansions is too big. While I do want to return to vanilla/TBC number values, there's no elegant solution, and there's nothing especially broken with it now from what I can tell.

[mysticx]

Who the fuck cares? The ability to solo old content shouldn't stand in the way of solving one of the biggest problems of current content.

How is it a problem though? The computers are all coping just fine, and it will be a while yet until the size of the numbers will be so huge that computers will have trouble with it (By which time we'll all have more powerful computers anyway :P ), the only things the proponents of an item squish say are "Numbers are getting silly" (Totally objective, that), "Won't anybody think of the computers?" (Just did, thanks), and of course "big numbers make my brain hurt!" or something to that effect, nothing that actually justifies all the work in rebalancing everything in the game, with the attendant risk of mistakes that utterly unbalance parts of the game.

TL-DR version: There's no objective reason to do an item squish and there are a huge number of pitfalls to rebalancing a game the size of WoW, so a squish is a huge risk for minor (if any) payoff.

[MasterHamster]

So remind me why the game needs an item squish when addons can do it for you?
Well assuming you want to reduce the numbers.

The iLevel chart spoke pretty clearly that we would lose relative power to older content.
Thanks, but I'd rather see high numbers than get nerfed just so people with dyscalculia will have less of an issue.

Computing power? puh-lease, there's no noticeable difference between computing time between small and large numbers. As long it's not crossing any integer limits there's zero issue.

[Vulpei]

However, inflation in economics is a semi-natural process. It is deflation which is ruinous and avoided like plague. But people, who don't like big numbers, are usually not good in economics either. I wonder how such people are dealing with currency even on most basic level, or are they trashing away everything which exceeds 999,99 $? If so, just send all exceeds to me, I am not "afraid" of big numbers

Deflation is avoided because it discourages investment, which is not valid in this circumstance. There may b e a problem with people acting like they do with comics when they renumber them, using it as a jumping off point, but that is about the only economics lesson you can use in this case.

[Phlegethon]

I love high numbers

I look forward to the day when i can crit for over a million

After all aint we suppose to be getting more powerful as we get to the magical 100

Why should the numbers be squished cause some people are scared of a few extra zeros

The lvl 80 paly killing elegon crit over 13mln I think?