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

[Recom]

Moved us back an expansion and a half in terms of numbers, hurt absolutely nothing. I don't see how anyone could be upset about this.

Because people in this thread want to hit for 1 damage at level 1 and 23 damage at level 100 with 700ilvl. Because that's fun !

Ion addressed that multiple times, ilvl inflation is needed so that players will FEEL like they're upgrading their gear. If you go from 1000 damage on your pyro to 1015 one tier later, you don't see it, you don't feel it, it sucks. If you go from 1000 to 1100, you start seeing something.

It doesn't matter if they squish every 3 expacs, players will adjust.

[Merceron]

no seriously, why? If this was meant long term to stop health and damage from being stupidly high numbers, the why in the actual fuck are stats almost just as high as they were last expansion. Next expansion were gonna easily have tanks with millions of health again. So for real, why did they even bother? And they're gonna piss off a lot more people if they have to do this every expansion than finding an actual solution that works.

I think they were paranoid about reaction after the first time they introduced the idea and everyone freaked out. So the plan was to do a very light version of the squish so ppl could see it wasn't so bad. Now that we've seen it once, my guess is that they will do a bigger one the next time around.

- - - Updated - - -

Just another aspect of WoD where Blizzard refused to use their brains.

Oh look, an intelligent answer. /sacrasm

[kenn9530]

Unsigned integer max is almost 4.3 billion. You're talking about a signed integer.

signed integers handle negative numbers while signed integers handle positive numbers so if i understand it correctly when you damage a boss you need to have it as a signed integer as your deducting numbers, so boss health has to be a signed integer to handle negative values.

[Deleted]

Physical hardware limitations. It was the cheapest, easiest, fastest way around them, and had absolutely no negative game effects.

Except massive sub losses.

[Edds]

stat squish was required.

Garrosh needed 3 different healthpools cause MoP was hitting the healthpool cap

[Deleted]

Bosses that heal themselves are way more realistic anyway, just like non-mage player targets heal themselves when you attack them.

[Dhrizzle]

The squish wasn't difficult in the slightest. Anything else would have required actual work and they like to avoid that these days.

What is it about the squish that isn't "actual work" compared to doing whatever your solution is? Also, do you not think the people who make the decision might be different to the people who eventually implement it, so what you're saying is the bosses don't want their employees to do "actual work?"

Just look at WoD.

Okay, what are the areas of other expansions that required "actual work" that WoD managed without "actual work?"

[Deleted]

It's been a while since I had to dabble around with setting field lengths but it applies to a lot of games, particularly games that make use of numbers. A lot of sports games will have their points for/points scored limited to 8 bits so its 0-255.

The field has a limit from -2 billion to 2 billion, or from 0 to 4 billion. Each zero in the number sequence takes up memory the next step up from the 32 bit number is 64 bit which is -9,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 9,000,000,000,000,000,000. If it was switched over the health of a critter would be: 0,000,000,000,000,000,005.

You could argue perhaps they have different limitations in place for different designations and that's entirely a possible distinction between critters and NPC's. But all NPC's would be of the same classification. In every game I've seen run into the problem of the integer bit limit they have always implemented something that reduces the chances of hitting that limit. Rather than have to facilitate such an enormous increase in memory usage for such little return.

Even if it was rolled out, only raid bosses and maybe special trash mobs would get it. Meaning in the lifetime of an expansion it would be changing the limit for maybe 30-40 NPC's in game.

[Army Dreamer]

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

They just needed a room for even more bumping it up.

[Deleted]

stat squish was required.

No, you got brainwashed by blizzard propaganda.

[Echocho]

Because people in this thread want to hit for 1 damage at level 1 and 23 damage at level 100 with 700ilvl. Because that's fun !

Ion addressed that multiple times, ilvl inflation is needed so that players will FEEL like they're upgrading their gear. If you go from 1000 damage on your pyro to 1015 one tier later, you don't see it, you don't feel it, it sucks. If you go from 1000 to 1100, you start seeing something.

It doesn't matter if they squish every 3 expacs, players will adjust.

Yeah but I think it got a bit too much. We did what, 20k in 630 gear? Maybe 20k increments every 100 iLvls would've been reasonable.

[Gaidax]

People are too oblivious to realize that they made much more than a momentary squish, they developed a tech to allow them to adjust global numbers on fly as they see fit, squish was only example of this system - such things like Timewalking is another byproduct of this system.

In addition, in the future they will be able to do another squish with much less effort, so it was a success.

[Lady Dragonheart]

I think that the item squish was very effective.

[kenn9530]

What is it about the squish that isn't "actual work" compared to doing whatever your solution is? Also, do you not think the people who make the decision might be different to the people who eventually implement it, so what you're saying is the bosses don't want their employees to do "actual work?

But a singed integer can handle both negative and positive number inclusively while a unsigned integer can only handle positive numbers, so boss health had to be designed around a signed integer or things wouldn't work out well, as soon as a negative number was introduced in a unsigned integer then things wouldn't work.

[Super Kami Dende]

Now... if it's dumb to think we get weaker when our hp, dps, hps gets nerfed and get useful abilities removed... then i'm a dumb shit. Just because everything else got nerfed doesnt mean we didnt get nerfed as well.

It's called "relativity" look it up.

[ringpriest]

no seriously, why? If this was meant long term to stop health and damage from being stupidly high numbers, the why in the actual fuck are stats almost just as high as they were last expansion. Next expansion were gonna easily have tanks with millions of health again. So for real, why did they even bother? And they're gonna piss off a lot more people if they have to do this every expansion than finding an actual solution that works.

Three possibilities (among many):

One - they meant what they said, but have (as a company) zero self control (a symptom of bad magement) and so everything immediately went to hell again magnitude-wise because that was easier than doing it right.

Two - the idea that the squish was hard and took a lot of work was a lie, but pretending that it was hard provided cover / an excuse for how little effort actually went into WoD.

Three - the squish was a prime concern of one or more staffers who have since left, so no one at Activision gives a damn about it any more.

[Bazgrim]

Again, it depends on the system and which type of unsigned int we're talking about. That's why programmers use things like sizeof(int) when they're writing code. It returns the actual size used by the system and not what someone thinks the size is going to be.

To be clear, we were talking about 32 bit integers. Not a specific named data type of some programming language like C, where something like the "int" data type can be of different sizes depending on the hardware.

[Deavane]

Part of the reason was the limitations of the game. Remember how Garrosh healed up 2-3 times during his fight in SoO? That's because, if all of the health you had to burn through was lumped into a single health pool, then the number would be higher than the maximum integer allowed by the game (Some 2-odd billion i believe). If we hadn't squished, every single boss in WoD would have to heal up mid-fight in order for it to not die in like 2 minutes.

Something like 2.147B I Believe. Also serves as Runescape's currency cap.

[The Firestar]

So far, I've seen plenty of arguments backed up by evidence in favor of the stat squish. And not a single argument backed up by any credible evidence against it.

Most of the arguments against it seem to be based in subjective cynicism (Blizzard is lazy, they don't want to do work, there was another better (undefined) solution that was passed over because it required actual work, etc) rather than objective facts. Some people have pointed towards the loss in sub numbers as "evidence" for their arguments. But if you look, Warlords hit 10m subs at its peak (Some two months into the stat squish, mind you). The reason subs dropped again is because people were dissatisfied with the content that Warlords offered (or lack thereof), rather than "my fireball hits for 20k rather than 200k." Just because the stat squish came out around the same time means nothing. Causation vs Correlation.

[Thelxi]

I think they were afraid to go too extreme with it and piss off the idiots that would see small numbers and think they are actually much weaker. They probably just tested the waters with this squish, and next squish might be a bit more impactful. Hopefully at least, cause doing a bandaid squish ever or every other expansion is terrible.