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

[Edds]

No, you got brainwashed by blizzard propaganda.

eat shit
10chars

[Deleted]

eat shit
10chars

Seriously go kill yourself IRL.

[Deleted]

Only solution is to remove difficulty leves. ther is just too many gear levels and itemlvl skyrocket every expansion. During TBC there was about 1-2k dps increse from Vanilla. Now numbers are 100x incresed every expansion becouse of stupid raid model.

[Dequanacus]

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.

This. Who cares if the numbers are lower? They had legitimate reasons for introducing the item squish, any further distress is simply looking for anything to complain about.

[Danifilth]

Everyone forgot how laggy or impossible to kill bosses without the item squish?

[Dezx]

Seriously go kill yourself IRL.

I am surprised people like you last this long in Forums.

[Sliske]

It did its job yes, but its like trying to stop a ship sinking by bucketing out the water. You have solved the problem very momentarily. We are on 800 ilvl when the legendary upgrade drops. Next expansion we will be looking at 1,000 ilvl legendaries. We will also be looking at 150k-200k dps and 1million+ hp.

HP isn't the problem. It really isn't the problem was and is dps numbers. I could throw a stormbolt that hit for a combined total for 2.5million+ on my warrior with bad gear in 5.4. I now can hope to execute for 600k with stars aligning as arms. We're still very far from 5.4 levels of damage numbers. It will take two expansions to get that far.

However, it will need to be done again. They have admitted this already.

[Deleted]

I am surprised people like you last this long in Forums.

You're a worthless retard for defending attackers, and therefore should follow suit.

[The Firestar]

It seems those against the item squish have had their arguments so thoroughly defeated that they've had to resort to flaming and name-calling.

I believe I'm done here. Peace out [/salute]

[Jackielope]

Until the game is fully 64 bit (which requires all players having a 64 bit operating system and supported hardware), stat squishes will be needed. 32 bit numbers have limits which have already been gone over.

Item and power levels had to go up because players didn't feel like gear was an upgrade if the stats didn't go up a certain amount each tier. That can still be seen in Blizzard's decision to upgrade Blackrock Foundry gear 5 levels from its original because players didn't feel like the gear was enough of an upgrade.

I think blizzard had a good technical reason not to swap over to 64b but I can't remember what that was

Part of it is game makers are still getting used to 64 bit (Blizzard still has plenty of kinks to work out in the 64 bit compatible game versions), but there's also the fact that Blizzard wanted more people to have access to WoW and not everyone has a 64 bit operating system. Windows 7 still has 32 bit versions so I wouldn't expect Blizzard to upgrade to 64 bit anytime soon.

I'd rather give them time to make sure they know how to work with 64 bit even if it means stat squish than have them force it out, make everyone buy new computers and/or operating systems, and probably get many more major and minor game bugs.

[klogaroth]

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.

Indeed.

With all the many different spell effects in the game I would be incredibly surprised if there isn't anything that uses a negative number somewhere in there.

Plus it was my understanding that it's considered very bad form to use unsigned integers for any substantial piece of software, as the likelihood of someone wanting to use a negative number at some point will be very high.

[Lei]

The problem with the squish is, that it works on the current level, but if you look back, it's a mess. One more squish and Lich king will drop gear with 2 intellect? What will a level 70 dungeon/raid drop? Stuff with 1 int? What about in between? And will your heirloom be 1 int/str from level 1-70? For how much can you squish the low level till it still makes any sense?
For me, it already pulled me out of immersion and "self-comfort" in the game as it is. It's disturbing for me that the 3 tier ICC gear (251/264/277) has the same stats on them. I'm not a roleplayer, but I like things that make sense, and bugs me if they don't.

Maybe they could mess around with the multipliers. So 1 int/str/stam would scale worse. You could have 1000 int on a gear but it would still result "only" 100k dps? With that, they could retain the in game ilevel/number flow.

[Bazgrim]

Integer is a specific named data type in computer science. 32-bit is the size based on the system Blizzard created with the game. It most assuredly could be 64-bit if they eliminated 32-bit support.

When you say "integer" relative to computer science, you are referring to some subset of the mathematical integers. The size of said subset is dependent on how many bits are being used. When we say 32 bit integer, there is only one range of values for unsigned and one range for signed, assuming twos complement for signed integers. When you referred to sizeof(int), you were talking about the fact that the C data type "int" maps to integers of different sizes depending on hardware. Anyway, this is wildly off topic so it's the last I'll say about it.

[Jackielope]

The problem with the squish is, that it works on the current level, but if you look back, it's a mess. One more squish and Lich king will drop gear with 2 intellect? What will a level 70 dungeon/raid drop? Stuff with 1 int? What about in between? And will your heirloom be 1 int/str from level 1-70? For how much can you squish the low level till it makes any sense?
For me, it already pulled me out of immersion and "self-comfort" in the game as it is. It's disturbing for me that the 3 tier ICC gear (251/264/277) has the same stats on them. I'm not a roleplayer, but I like things that make sense, and bugs me if they don't make sense.

Would you rather have a game that makes sense, or a game that's actually playable? That really and truly is why the stat squish went into effect.

Yes, it's a shitty compromise, but the fact is if they hadn't done the stat squish the numbers in the game could not have been handled even with modern computers.

[Cthulhu 2020]

1. It was never stated as a "long term solution", they even said themselves that they'd have to do it again at some point in the future.
2. Power creep is an inevitability in MMO's, unless you'd rather continue playing new expansions where you never got stronger, you just kept getting cool new transmogs.

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

[Osmeric]

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.

They squished because they WANTED to be able to inflate numbers a lot during an expansion. Now that squishing is a thing, numbers can wildly grow without care, since they can and will be squished again.

You'd seemed to have the unfounded idea that a squish would mean they would never let numbers grow again. Where did you get this incorrect idea?

[tj119]

They should have done a complete reset to vanilla numbers to save them the hassle of doing it again so soon, but Blizzard can't do much right these days.

[ComputerNerd]

The squish had effects beyond that rather narrow-minded view of end-game or level cap content.
It reduced the humps that came with expansion content.
As shown by the regular complaints that any given expansions new greens were better than most of the gear you worked hard for previously.
This allows it to remain relevant for longer.

It also prevents an issue where an upper limit on boss health was being hit, and forced encounter mechanics to change around it.
Like garrosh healing.
Certainly potential for raising that upper cap, but that on its own isn't solving anything else.

They should have done a complete reset to vanilla numbers to save them the hassle of doing it again so soon, but Blizzard can't do much right these days.

Stupid argument.
Changes to health to get rid of resilience, so the two are out of sync.
You can't just get vanilla numbers when the two are now scaling differently.
Do you try to get the health numbers, or the damage numbers as you cant do both.
And that is just the change in that one place, let alone how it could have changed over the years for other reasons.

They squished because they WANTED to be able to inflate numbers a lot during an expansion. Now that squishing is a thing, numbers can wildly grow without care, since they can and will be squished again.

You'd seemed to have the unfounded idea that a squish would mean they would never let numbers grow again. Where did you get this incorrect idea?

Correct.
Current content is meant to have gear upgrades feel better by giving you bigger numbers.
Universally squishing everything down to a flat gradient would stop it feeling special or worthwhile.
In addition to minimising the difficulty increase that comes with higher formats.

[Lei]

Would you rather have a game that makes sense, or a game that's actually playable?

I don't think the former is (hast to be) exclusive to the latter.

[Bazgrim]

Until the game is fully 64 bit (which requires all players having a 64 bit operating system and supported hardware), stat squishes will be needed. 32 bit numbers have limits which have already been gone over.

Item and power levels had to go up because players didn't feel like gear was an upgrade if the stats didn't go up a certain amount each tier. That can still be seen in Blizzard's decision to upgrade Blackrock Foundry gear 5 levels from its original because players didn't feel like the gear was enough of an upgrade.



Part of it is game makers are still getting used to 64 bit (Blizzard still has plenty of kinks to work out in the 64 bit compatible game versions), but there's also the fact that Blizzard wanted more people to have access to WoW and not everyone has a 64 bit operating system. Windows 7 still has 32 bit versions so I wouldn't expect Blizzard to upgrade to 64 bit anytime soon.

I'd rather give them time to make sure they know how to work with 64 bit even if it means stat squish than have them force it out, make everyone buy new computers and/or operating systems, and probably get many more major and minor game bugs.

You don't need a 64 bit system running the 64 bit client before they can store boss health as a 64 bit integer.