Why in the actual hell was there an item squish??

[melodramocracy]

Because the game is designed in such a way that gear progression is directly equivalent to player power, when in reality all it needs to account for is potential access to content.

If they don't address this issue, you'll see more squishes happen in the future.

[edmorte]

The 32 vs. 64 bit issue has nothing to do with hardware. It has to do with what integer types were used in the software, and especially the size of integer fields in the data formats used to communicate between server and game clients.

In C++ the hardware tell the size of types, some guarantees apply like long will be @ least 32bits. You can always push to 64 bits integers, but in the end, the computer @ the end of the client will tell the word size.

IMHO long long could be a better approach, but i don't know the source code situation, if they have used macros or hard coded the type.

Squishing is not the problem, the shit job they did is.

[Mormolyce]

Is it really that important to you if that piece of gear is itemlevel 695 or 650? It's just a number, nothing else.

Of course not, they could just as easily have scaled down the ILVLs too.

In fact only reason they didn't is that so many people have become accustomed to the ILVLs for each raid so they figured meh, leave them.

[Citation needed]

You don't remember them talking about it as a feature of MoP? Ultimately postponed until WoD though. It was very public at the time, heaps of threads about it.

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In C++ the hardware tell the size of types, some guarantees apply like long will be @ least 32bits. You can always push to 64 bits integers, but in the end, the computer @ the end of the client will tell the word size.

IMHO long long could be a better approach, but i don't know the source code situation, if they have used macros or hard coded the type.

Squishing is not the problem, the shit job they did is.

The technical issues are a sideshow. The reality is they thought the numbers started to look ridiculous.

Shit job my ass, the changeover was so smooth that apart from a few rapidly-fixed bugs you didn't even notice the difference.

In fact until this thread I hadn't thought about it since launch.

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Item squish was a good idea.
Blizzard just needs to get their act together and stop changing their minds - ending up with half-assed decisions.

They should've kept linear growth in stats. Instead they went back to exponential growth for WoD items. That's called being stupid.

That was always the plan, otherwise your upgrades feel lame and barely worth raiding for. They'll just go back and do another squish 3-4 expansions from now.

[rda]

The technical issues are a sideshow. The reality is they thought the numbers started to look ridiculous.

The reality is precisely the technical issues. They did the squish because it was the simplest thing they could think of that allowed the numbers to grow for some time. They would have moved to 64-bit values if they didn't want to do the simplest thing possible.

[Deleted]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3885585/

even blizzard agrees that it feels weird

In other words, your Fireball will still do the same percentage damage to a player or a creature that it does today, but the number would be smaller. Logically, this seems like it would work, and it does. But it feels weird. When we tried this internally, everyone agreed that it just felt off throwing a spell for hundreds of damage when you are used to it doing thousands of damage.

and it still feels wrong to me.
they need to change it back.

[Addict]

and it still feels wrong to me.
they need to change it back.

Them feels man. If you want bigger numbers - get parrot or MSBT and tweak it to add some 0's. It can be done.

[Deleted]

On a side note, they COULD have given bosses a % dmg reduction from players. Like, If players would only 30% of their normal dmg to garrosh he wouldn't need to heal, right?

[Deleted]

Seeing numbers like 100 000 and 180 000 to float around your target is retarded.
I never really understood their idea about exponential scaling feeling rewarding, whilst linear scaling not feeling rewarding enough.

If a piece of gear is stronger, it is stronger no matter if it is with +1 primary stats, or +100.

I believe this is just an explanation meant to fool playerbase.

Real reason for exponential scaling: To gate next raid difficulty/tier behind the need to farm stronger gear. I.e. to make you unable to defeat Heroic last boss with your Normal gear. That makes raids last longer.
Which is retarded tool to artificially prolong content usage and relieve them from the obligation to create more content.

[Zka]

Because it worked?

People are doing 50"ish"K DPS instead of the 2-3million or more they would've been.

Seems like a success to me.

Exactly this. However they should have squished much more imho. Another squish will be inevitable in 8.0 if not in 7.0

[Surfd]

They just go batshit crazy with the item level increases. That is the reason the item squish didn't work and that is the reason all content except the current patch one is obsolete. Sad truth.

But then you run into a problem of "how much is enough"? When they have 5 (ish) tiers of gear level for each raid (lfr, normal, heroic, mythic + warforged possibilities for all), then exactly what becomes an acceptable inrease in item level between sets to make getting something from the next tier feel like an upgrade?

[Dasani]

When you design your game to have exponential stat growth every expansion, guess what happens.

I mean going from a couple thousand hitpoints in vanilla to a million in MOP is a pretty big jump. I mean yeah, it's been 10 years, but seriously that is a 100,000% increase. Seriously?

It isn't needed. There is absolutely zero reason to have power increase that dramatically constantly. And now the power creep is so extreme you go up more between raid tiers than you did between entire expansions years ago. Blizzard just likes to see big numbers until they see big numbers then they are like "oh shit, we have to fix this" then use a bandaid fix then immediately increase everything to more big numbers again.

They need long term solutions and a change in design philosophy instead of ridiculous stat squishes periodically. Doubt we'll ever see that much logic from this company though.

[Mormolyce]

The reality is precisely the technical issues. They did the squish because it was the simplest thing they could think of that allowed the numbers to grow for some time. They would have moved to 64-bit values if they didn't want to do the simplest thing possible.

You're wrong, they did it for the simple reason that they felt that the numbers were starting to seem silly. When players have millions of HP and do millions of DPS that just starts to feel ridiculous. Changing a few variables to 64-bit or whatever was required would surely be a lot easier than rescaling the entire game... that took them ages...

They mentioned things like certain numbers capping out the allowed digits (eg threat - not that anyone cares) purely as illustration, it wasn't the motivation for the change.

[Foxhoundn]

Immersion and progression don't matter to blizzard. Item squish killed immersion. What's the point of leveling just to get squished again after an expansion or two.

Please present me your solution on overcomeing integer limit.

[Mormolyce]

When you design your game to have exponential stat growth every expansion, guess what happens.

I mean going from a couple thousand hitpoints in vanilla to a million in MOP is a pretty big jump. I mean yeah, it's been 10 years, but seriously that is a 100,000% increase. Seriously?

It isn't needed. There is absolutely zero reason to have power increase that dramatically constantly. And now the power creep is so extreme you go up more between raid tiers than you did between entire expansions years ago. Blizzard just likes to see big numbers until they see big numbers then they are like "oh shit, we have to fix this" then use a bandaid fix then immediately increase everything to more big numbers again.

They need long term solutions and a change in design philosophy instead of ridiculous stat squishes periodically. Doubt we'll ever see that much logic from this company though.

It actually makes perfect sense, ILVL increased pretty much linearly with level up to each level cap. But each tier of raiding needs to have a significant power upgrade so that you feel like you're improving. Otherwise you wonder why you put in all that effort, and some better itemised pieces from lower tiers might even become competitive.

The only thing they didn't anticipate was WoW lasting 10 years, because who would've guessed that? Even if they'd known I don't know if they would've done anything differently.

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Immersion and progression don't matter to blizzard. Item squish killed immersion. What's the point of leveling just to get squished again after an expansion or two.

I'm sorry, you were immersed in the numbers on your damage meter?

Sometimes this community hurts my brain.

[Deleted]

I'm sorry, you were immersed in the numbers on your damage meter?

Just like a lot of things in WoW, the damage numbers visualized your progression through the world of Warcraft.
You start in a zone as a nobody doing 5 damage to a boar and after many years you are doing millions of damage to gods.
Seeing a reset without any story reasons, that is also half hearted, just feels wrong.

[rda]

You're wrong, they did it for the simple reason that they felt that the numbers were starting to seem silly. When players have millions of HP and do millions of DPS that just starts to feel ridiculous. Changing a few variables to 64-bit or whatever was required would surely be a lot easier than rescaling the entire game... that took them ages...

They mentioned things like certain numbers capping out the allowed digits (eg threat - not that anyone cares) purely as illustration, it wasn't the motivation for the change.

The numbers starting to look silly was an excuse. There are always small pros and cons for everything. The real reason they did the squish and not something else is that the squish was the easiest of things that minimally worked.

This phrase - "Changing a few variables to 64-bit or whatever was required would surely be a lot easier than rescaling the entire game... that took them ages..." - is grotesquely wrong. You don't know what you are talking about *at all*, stop pretending.

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I'm sorry, you were immersed in the numbers on your damage meter?

Yes. Doing 1k dps, then 10k, then 100k, then 1000k gives the sense of progression. Suddenly doing 10k again breaks that sense. It might be tolerable to do it *once*, it is absolutely not fine to be doing it regularly.

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Please present me your solution on overcomeing integer limit.

64-bit values. There are other solutions as well.

[Shahad]

64-bit values. There are other solutions as well.

At the rate character power is increasing, I think the best solution is probably to use the Mega Damage™ method.

[rda]

At the rate character power is increasing, I think the best solution is probably to use the Mega Damage™ method.

It's the same thing, you store big values, you just display them in short format ("10M", "5G", etc, perhaps with some extra shinies for bigger suffixes).

[Deleted]

People tend to forget that in mop we had 80% resilience in the last patch. That would make your EHP in the millions in PvP combat, as you normally had about 500-600k health

[knight of thorns]

Yes. Doing 1k dps, then 10k, then 100k, then 1000k gives the sense of progression. Suddenly doing 10k again breaks that sense. It might be tolerable to do it *once*, it is absolutely not fine to be doing it regularly.

Once again I have to ask this, because no reply was given before: If bigger numbers makes you feel more powerful, how do you explain Garrosh and Nazgrim, orcs with no extraordinary powers being much more powerful (more hit points and more damage) than Old Gods, Burning Legion commanders, dragon aspects and the Lich King?