Do you want a "number squish" to happen?

[skitzy129]

Because are brains have an easier time imagining what smaller numbers mean. As in, if you're critting for 225 with an ability and auto attacks hit for 45, it's going to mean more to you than if you are critting for 2837482348726345728645784 and a normal hit is 183739235872604572864518.

I disagree completely. It's often unnecessary given the context of the situation to look past the first few numbers anyway. We know how many digits are there, and they don't all need to be read. I have absolutely no problem discerning the numbers in their current state.

[klaps_05]

would you like to do 5000 dmg in 1 spell or 102,945 and over million on certain encounters? i would always prefer the latter since I enjoy it the most -_-

[Thyranne]

Yeah easier to balance for sure, but not too much easier. And I would say 250000 takes longer because you have to count zeros. And, it's a simple fact of nature that larger numbers are harder for the human brain to comprehend

Thats why they went with the mega damage solution.

Rubbish. Once the numbers are in the thousands there is enough precision that it makes no difference to balance. The game engine itself goes down to fractions of a point in any case so it's irrelevant.

What's easier to adjust:

100 dps or 100k dps?

Remember that both are integer numbers.

[The Original Goblite]

Rubbish. Once the numbers are in the thousands there is enough precision that it makes no difference to balance. The game engine itself goes down to fractions of a point in any case so it's irrelevant.

And it's not 250,000 vs. 3,147. It's 248,732 vs. 3,147. Which you quote as "250k" vs. "3.1k" - you're rounding to 2 significant figures regardless. Nobody gives a shit if you do 248,732 DPS or 248,733 DPS. Whether you realise it or not you're "squishing stats" in your head anyway.

^this
250,000 damage and 2,500 damage (aside from what is arithmetically obvious) aren't going to be different at all- only the first three numbers are significant anyway.
Heck, who cares if you do 2509 damage vs 2501? no matter what the size of the number, the only really significant part is going to be first three digits because everything else is less than 1% of the value.

I can understand peoples concerns about soloing old bosses. It was said that they would scale boss health and abilities down to be consistent with the gear level that players would have been expected to have when doing those bosses at that level- e.g. molten core would be doable by level 60 players in level 60 dungeon blues (which have also been scaled down). That statement doesn't comfort me too much either though, and I imagine that some soloable bosses may not be after such a change- but I can't imagine not being able to solo MC anymore or anything- more likely ulduar 25 content is where we'd see it.
That said... I never had a problem with grabbing a buddy or ten to go do some old stuff so I'm still all for the squish. It'd make my 60 twink all the more beasty.

[hulkgor]

I would also like a massive squish to occur. It's just gotten to absurd values now, either on damage, and on character stats. It's just.. silly. Not really bothered if it doesn't, but hey, one can wish.

[ZeroEdgeir]

I still don't get where people are coming up with the idea that old content will become harder to solo. All raid content, past and present, would have to be scaled down too. It would be a pretty major process, to ensure that the content is still "working as intended", which means a group of intended level players can handle it in the scope needed. Wouldn't shock me if, during this, they scaled MC/BWL/AQ40 down to 25-man as well, instead of the old 40-man format, but that may only be for consistency reasons (they did it to AQ20 down to AQ10).

Blizzard also stated, not in that article from GC, but in other blue posts about it back before MoP launched (or even had a launch date), that they would want to maintain as much of the soloing integrity of old content as they could. So, it might take a little bit to adjust, but I doubt it will hold too much impact. If you got 400,000 health and a boss does 1100 damage (Molten Core), or you got 40000 health and the boss does 110 damage, it's still the same percentage. It just makes things more balanced internally for the system to handle, and smooth out the grade.

And hey! Wanna know what the squish would mean? Your top-end raid gear would almost 100% last you into at least Heroics, if not full raiding, of the next expansion!

[darkwarrior42]

I don't care either way, and have a hard time respecting the intellect of anyone that does.

There is no mechanical or practical difference between doing 10 damage to something with 100 hp and doing 10k damage to something with 100k hp. The *only* possible reason to reduce the numbers is that it's easier to read smaller numbers quickly, and that's easily dealt with at an interface level. Conversely, the larger the numbers you have, the more room there is for fine differences. (For example, if I'm doing 10 dps, the smallest increase I could possibly have is 1, which is a 10% boost. At 100 dps, I could increase my dps by 1, which would be a 1% boost. Obviously, we wouldn't have that low a number in any event, but the principle is similar.)


I'm of course assuming that people know the difference between "squishing" (which is reducing the absolute values of the numbers so that they are significantly SMALLER) and other concepts that would be handled at an interface level, such as "truncating" and "rounding" (both of which leave the values unchanged, but display them to the user with fewer significant digits so they're easier to read on the fly.) In other words, if I"m doing 243,379 damage right now, here is the result if I squish, truncate, or round that number:
Truncation: 243k damage.
Rounding: 243,000 damage.
Squishing: 2,430 damage.

(Note : I'm also personally assuming that in the case of rounding, it would only be rounding on the interface, and that the game would still keep track of the real numbers; that is, if the game displayed 243,000 damage on the interface, the mob would still take 243,379 damage. For that reason, I personally favor truncation, with the combat log displaying full values for situations when it matters.)

---------- Post added 2013-04-04 at 01:09 AM ----------

I still don't get where people are coming up with the idea that old content will become harder to solo. All raid content, past and present, would have to be scaled down too. It would be a pretty major process, to ensure that the content is still "working as intended", which means a group of intended level players can handle it in the scope needed. Wouldn't shock me if, during this, they scaled MC/BWL/AQ40 down to 25-man as well, instead of the old 40-man format, but that may only be for consistency reasons (they did it to AQ20 down to AQ10).

True, but that doesn't mean old content won't become harder. Right now, kara level gear is ilvl 125, while naxx-10 level gear is ilvl 200. After a squish, you might see something like Kara gear being ilvl 100, Naxx-10 gear being ilvl 120. Each would still be balanced around the appropriate gear for the level, but higher level characters would have a much smaller advantage, and since that advantage is largely what max level toons rely upon to solo old content, it could very well become harder to solo old content. In fact, this sort of thing is exactly what would have to happen for an item level squish.

[Thyranne]

I still don't get where people are coming up with the idea that old content will become harder to solo. All raid content, past and present, would have to be scaled down too. It would be a pretty major process, to ensure that the content is still "working as intended", which means a group of intended level players can handle it in the scope needed. Wouldn't shock me if, during this, they scaled MC/BWL/AQ40 down to 25-man as well, instead of the old 40-man format, but that may only be for consistency reasons (they did it to AQ20 down to AQ10).

Blizzard also stated, not in that article from GC, but in other blue posts about it back before MoP launched (or even had a launch date), that they would want to maintain as much of the soloing integrity of old content as they could. So, it might take a little bit to adjust, but I doubt it will hold too much impact. If you got 400,000 health and a boss does 1100 damage (Molten Core), or you got 40000 health and the boss does 110 damage, it's still the same percentage. It just makes things more balanced internally for the system to handle, and smooth out the grade.

And hey! Wanna know what the squish would mean? Your top-end raid gear would almost 100% last you into at least Heroics, if not full raiding, of the next expansion!

Except that in the graphic that was showed to us everything was scaled down except Vanilla.

[timtim89]

you gain levels you gain stats only right the numbers keep on getting bigger

[Haven]

It better happen. 1097236428364 DPS is stupid. What's the point of huge numbers, when every number is huge? Yes, you might crit for 5000000 damage, but what does it mean for an enemy with 73 billion hitpoints? Also, this makes the leveling look stupid. A newbie would have to spend literally hours to bring down a non-resisting lvl90, that's idiocy.

In any number, you only look at the first three digits. The rest is just small change, it's irrelevant. And I wish it would never go higher than three, maximum four digits.

[coldbear]

Simple UI button?

"Check this box to have all numbers divided by 1000, with no 'k' inserted at the end, and all decimals rounded up."

[Prokne]

I still don't get where people are coming up with the idea that old content will become harder to solo. All raid content, past and present, would have to be scaled down too. It would be a pretty major process, to ensure that the content is still "working as intended", which means a group of intended level players can handle it in the scope needed. Wouldn't shock me if, during this, they scaled MC/BWL/AQ40 down to 25-man as well, instead of the old 40-man format, but that may only be for consistency reasons (they did it to AQ20 down to AQ10).

Blizzard also stated, not in that article from GC, but in other blue posts about it back before MoP launched (or even had a launch date), that they would want to maintain as much of the soloing integrity of old content as they could. So, it might take a little bit to adjust, but I doubt it will hold too much impact. If you got 400,000 health and a boss does 1100 damage (Molten Core), or you got 40000 health and the boss does 110 damage, it's still the same percentage. It just makes things more balanced internally for the system to handle, and smooth out the grade.

And hey! Wanna know what the squish would mean? Your top-end raid gear would almost 100% last you into at least Heroics, if not full raiding, of the next expansion!

The reason soloing will be affected is this:

Currently players scale exponentially with level and gear.(Bosses also scale somewhat exponentially but its not really important)
The squish make characters scale linearly until max level then new raid tiers go exponential again(from lower starting point so lower dps/heals ect)
Since players scale exponentially a lvl 90 character will see a larger % decrease than a lvl 70 character(or boss) so relative to lower levels the 90 is weaker.

The only way for Blizz to fix this problem if they do a squish is to nerf old raids and if you do that its not really the same.

[Mormolyce]

What's easier to adjust:

100 dps or 100k dps?

Remember that both are integer numbers.

They aren't actually integers. And the stat squish would take you from I don't know, 100k to 10k maybe. Your "easy to adjust" thing is a non-issue.

Except that in the graphic that was showed to us everything was scaled down except Vanilla.

As I recall the plan was to squish tiers and not levels, so there'd still be the same stat difference between lvl70 and lvl80 but Kara and Sunwell would be squished down to roughly the same ilvl. Because it's more the raid tiers that have caused the stat bloat rather than the levels themselves.

They can tune bosses down further to compensate for lost "soloing" potential, but they don't have to. Soloing is not intended or supported gameplay. If you can solo something, good for you is basically their attitude.

P.S. If you look carefully in the graph below it looks like the Vanilla tiers would be squished like all the others.

---------- Post added 2013-04-04 at 02:50 AM ----------

The reason soloing will be affected is this:

Currently players scale exponentially with level and gear.(Bosses also scale somewhat exponentially but its not really important)
The squish make characters scale linearly until max level then new raid tiers go exponential again(from lower starting point so lower dps/heals ect)
Since players scale exponentially a lvl 90 character will see a larger % decrease than a lvl 70 character(or boss) so relative to lower levels the 90 is weaker.

The only way for Blizz to fix this problem if they do a squish is to nerf old raids and if you do that its not really the same.

They don't really go up exponentially. It's roughly linear, it's just that it goes like this:

1...10...20...30...40...50...60...[tier]...[tier]...[tier]...70...[tier]...[tier]...[tier]...80... etc

So if you ignore the tiers and just look at levels it goes up mostly linearly but with big spikes at the 60, 70, 80 and 85 marks.

Here's the original image (I think it's more of an illustration though):



I think it's ILVL on the left. Faded lines are current, opaque lines are post-squish.

[Musta Kyy]

Blizzard pretty much has to do a number squish before the next expansion.
Otherwise we would be having 7-10mil hp and would doing 1.5-2mil dps (according to blizzard the numbers would rise about 16 times as the growth is exponential).
Having numbers so big is bad for computations that the game does all the time. Also doing for example 200k crits like now is kind of stupid seeing 5-6 numbers on your screen after every melee hit.

Also I would guess balancing PvP would be much easier when everything isnt so exponential so to speak :P

[ablib]

People who think the number squish would kill soloing or do anything different to the gameplay of the game, does not understand simple math.

The only change that will happen will be perception. You will feel weaker (when you're really not), and things will be strange, but other than that...nothing will be different.

[Rucati]

Yes they should absolutely do a number squish. Numbers are just getting too crazy, people regularly crit for 200k+ in raids, and next expansion that's just going to increase exponentially.

I'd love for them to squish things back to how they were in BC, those numbers were nice and reasonable. People had like 10-20k health, it just made a lot more sense. But they definitely won't, because it'd be far too much work.

[Seranthor]

No offense, but I think your exaggerating a little bit, and no one is forcing you to participate in these threads. I could not find any polls on the subject.

You cant find any because you didn't look... but, no offense taken, most that start polls/threads like this didn't look. So you aren't alone.

[Pool of the Dead]

Yes and no.

No, mostly because it would feel like my characters have lost all their strength/progression etc.

Yes, because if everyone is back doing around 5k DPS Specs/Classes will be much closer together again meaning entire specs won't be sat out from raiding as often.

I.e. 2 Classes now one doing 120k dps another doing 110k dps in similar gear, 10k damage looks to be a big difference.

If in similar one class did 5.5k dps and the other class did 5.3k dps. The difference looks a lot less. of course it won't stop min/maxers, but it would reduce the amount of pseudo-elitists since with smaller numbers they probably would not get on the "HURR UR BAD DPS SPEC" bandwagon as much.

[Seranthor]

I voted yes but now that I looked at the thread I might vote no.

I like soloing old content. If this means that this itemsquish would make that harder/impossible (soloing old content) then no I don't want an item squish.

If this means that old content gets "squished" aswell, then by all means, make the squish happen. Doing executes for nearly 2 million is a bit daft...

but a 2M exectute on say Tortos is what?... 0.5%

[BrerBear]

People who think the number squish would kill soloing or do anything different to the gameplay of the game, does not understand simple math.

Is that so?

The only change that will happen will be perception. You will feel weaker (when you're really not), and things will be strange, but other than that...nothing will be different.

OK, here's an exercise you can do to appease us simpletons.

Show us your proposed player health and attack power values at expansion end for 60, 70, 80, 85, and 90 AFTER your proposed squish.
Then, show us your proposed health values for Ragnaros, Brutallus, the Lich King (10), and Morchok (10) AFTER your proposed squish.

All are currently soloable. Let's see how your new numbers stack up, shall we?