Anyone Not Looking Forward to Stat Squish?

[Zka]

Gear becoming obsolete makes WoW what it is. I doubt you'll ever see the devs allowing old gear to get you very far into the next expansion, the odd bit (cloak, Garrosh heirlooms) aside.

It's okay that gear gets obsolete. On the other hand it's not okay that it gets obsolete so fast and so much. I don't want to carry over gear to a new expansion. I want to carry over to the next raid tier. Blizzard is shooting themselves in the foot by making gear and raid content obsolete so quickly.

[Cassidin]

Personally I don't see why it's needed (and people saying "of course it's needed don't convince me WHY). However I do not claim to know all the ins and outs of it so whatever.

The one thing that I do know is that it will FEEL odd, weaker. Even GC said that when they first tried it - the didn't do it then because it felt wrong. I know everything else is getting nerfed to match so our characters wont BE weaker but they will FEEL it (at least to some - I think a lot - of people).

As an analogy, take a sport like motor racing. Many people find it very exciting. The high speed is that turns them on to it. But what if it was slower.... It would be safer! Why not make ALL the cars not able to go faster than 30mph. There would still be the competition... there would still be the tactics...... Everyone would have the same nerf... so would it be as good? Definitely not! Nerfing everything together doesn't stop it being a nerf.

I don't know if its needed or not... but I don't look forward to it.

[tankbug]

Why do people fear the item squish? Because they don't listen to what the devs are saying.
There will be a squish to reduce the huge numbers, however.....(50% of the players stop reading here) ....your character will be just as powerful relative to the content. Soloing old raids will be possible due to a buff you get when you enter it or something. It will be taken care of.

[jbombard]

Ok: no, that is not what I am trying to say. A flat squish won't cut it, it has to be variable based on lvl/ilvl. See graph.

They have already said it is an iLevel squish. They aren't changing the way iLevel works. To mess with how iLevel works would be a far reaching change likely to have a lot of unintended consequences.

[Tyriss]

Biased poll options.. should be ashamed of yourself. The game needs a stat squish - bring the numbers into line.

It doesn't matter if we are dealing with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands - on their own the numbers are meaningless. Only when you start comparing your numbers to those around you do they then have a figurative value.

[Cassidin]

Which doesn't matter in the least. You'll still be one shotting everything bellow level 60. What might change is that your one shits will be a bit less overkill.

And we wouldnt want overkill shits!

[jbombard]

Why do people fear the item squish? Because they don't listen to what the devs are saying.
There will be a squish to reduce the huge numbers, however.....(50% of the players stop reading here) ....your character will be just as powerful relative to the content. Soloing old raids will be possible due to a buff you get when you enter it or something. It will be taken care of.

Basically there are 3 groups.
People who believe Blizzard can do wrong and will believe whatever they say.
People who believe Blizzard can do no right and want to spout forth rantings of doom.
People who want to have an honest discussion.

You can usually tell which are which fairly easily.

[crazymack]

That's why things don't scale in a straight line.

- - - Updated - - -



Its not lag. There are specific bugs where if a number gets too high it rolls back down to zero and starts counting again.

This exact same thing would happen in WoW if numbers aren't reduced.

This is how counting works in real life...You can't magically add another digit in real life like you can in your head.

[eem5]

I am not sure about other people, but it isn't that I don't think it can it's just that I would rather Blizzard not have to spend their time dicking around with old content and focus on new content. If they have to do a squish every expack from now on, that seems like an awfully lot of work for something that is a number formatting issue.

I seriously doubt blizzard would be pushing this if it was as simple as a number formatting issue. I'll bet one of the subsystems has a technical upper limit. If you look at the graph, my chicken scratching would leave many many more expansions before another squish would be needed. Also, if another needed doing in 4-5 expansions time, I'd say blizzard would be implementing the hooks now to make that process a lot easier and cheaper.

[Aerr]

As long as it doesn't affect my ability to solo old content, I give a grand total of 0 shits.

Exactly.
Soloing should stay the way it is, for me it's one of the things in wow I really enjoy.

[tankbug]

Personally I don't see why it's needed (and people saying "of course it's needed don't convince me WHY). However I do not claim to know all the ins and outs of it so whatever.

The one thing that I do know is that it will FEEL odd, weaker. Even GC said that when they first tried it - the didn't do it then because it felt wrong. I know everything else is getting nerfed to match so our characters wont BE weaker but they will FEEL it (at least to some - I think a lot - of people).

As an analogy, take a sport like motor racing. Many people find it very exciting. The high speed is that turns them on to it. But what if it was slower.... It would be safer! Why not make ALL the cars not able to go faster than 30mph. There would still be the competition... there would still be the tactics...... Everyone would have the same nerf... so would it be as good? Definitely not! Nerfing everything together doesn't stop it being a nerf.

I don't know if its needed or not... but I don't look forward to it.

I don't think your analogy applies, since you will be just as "fast" after the item squish. I don't really see the difference between critting for 500k on a mob with millions of hp and critting for 500 on a mob with thousands of hp. They will die just as fast, and you are just as strong.

[eem5]

They have already said it is an iLevel squish. They aren't changing the way iLevel works. To mess with how iLevel works would be a far reaching change likely to have a lot of unintended consequences.

Yes, and a variable scale as per my graph won't mess with how iLvl works, it's just a modifier to the data. it can't be a flat scale (eg -200), but rather be a small decrease for lower levels and a high decrease at higher levels. This is what my graphs show.

[Cassidin]

I don't think your analogy applies, since you will be just as "fast" after the item squish. I don't really see the difference between critting for 500k on a mob with millions of hp and critting for 500 on a mob with thousands of hp. They will die just as fast, and you are just as strong.

I should have added - reducing the track length to make the race take as long. The point is that the excitement would be gone simply because the speed is reduced. Everyone would be reduced the same - but it would just not be as exciting. I personally feel that suddenly logging on one day and hitting for 100 will feel very odd. Will I get used to it? Of course I will. Doesn't mean I look forward to it though.

I would also add that I think as has been already mentioned - the scope for bugs to make this a pain for some time is huge. Only time will tell for that - but I think it will take a few patches to get it sorted out.

[Braindwen]

I don't think your analogy applies, since you will be just as "fast" after the item squish. I don't really see the difference between critting for 500k on a mob with millions of hp and critting for 500 on a mob with thousands of hp. They will die just as fast, and you are just as strong.

Well fine, make everyone drive at 10% speed on a course that's 1/10th as long (and if you want to be a real stickler, magically make everything else like tires and gas scale down as needed as well). It'd take just as long, but I doubt many people that enjoy it now still would.

No, it's not going to be as enjoyable to hit for 500 as it is to hit for 500,000. I'm glad you say that (since it's hard to know for sure) it won't matter to you. You are not everyone. Try and understand that being nerfed (massively) overnight isn't all that fun. Sure it's relative, and once we forget the good old days where we did hundreds of thousands of damage a hit and had a million health we won't care anymore, but it'll absolutely feel awkward when it happens.

I would also add that I think as has been already mentioned - the scope for bugs to make this a pain for some time is huge. Only time will tell for that - but I think it will take a few patches to get it sorted out.

There were like... 6 or 7 different bugs with JUST the tank druid set bonuses this tier.

Oh man, the number of errors they'll make with this is going to be interesting, one way or the other. Either they'll pull off a major upset and make it work on the first try, or more likely there'll be those forgotten mobs every now and then using old or incorrect values and causing all sorts of fun.

Scaling the players should be easy, the ilvl formula's all there so they just need to remove the jumps between old raid tiers and maybe fiddle with base health a bit and they're done. As long as they plan it well in advance for an expansion, they'll be fine on the next tier's gear as well. As far as retuning every single enemy from BC onwards... yeah...

[cidic]

Personally I don't see why it's needed (and people saying "of course it's needed don't convince me WHY). However I do not claim to know all the ins and outs of it so whatever.

The one thing that I do know is that it will FEEL odd, weaker. Even GC said that when they first tried it - the didn't do it then because it felt wrong. I know everything else is getting nerfed to match so our characters wont BE weaker but they will FEEL it (at least to some - I think a lot - of people).

As an analogy, take a sport like motor racing. Many people find it very exciting. The high speed is that turns them on to it. But what if it was slower.... It would be safer! Why not make ALL the cars not able to go faster than 30mph. There would still be the competition... there would still be the tactics...... Everyone would have the same nerf... so would it be as good? Definitely not! Nerfing everything together doesn't stop it being a nerf.

I don't know if its needed or not... but I don't look forward to it.

I'm pretty sure there was (infact I know there was a blue post) that explained why it would happen. There was something about the numbers getting so out of hand (on their end for server side things) that it was approaching a limit (iirc) and that it needed to happen.

As for when/if it does happen as many have said. As long as it does not effect me soloing older content I really do not care at all.

[jbombard]

I seriously doubt blizzard would be pushing this if it was as simple as a number formatting issue. I'll bet one of the subsystems has a technical upper limit. If you look at the graph, my chicken scratching would leave many many more expansions before another squish would be needed. Also, if another needed doing in 4-5 expansions time, I'd say blizzard would be implementing the hooks now to make that process a lot easier and cheaper.

They have stated in the past that a database limitation. Now I have no idea what hardware or database software they are using, but the kind of numbers we are talking about can be stored in any modern database. This leads me to believe it is a problem with their particular database design and not a limitation of the database software they are using. If this is the case, this is a problem companies go through all the time as they grow, and one that they successfully fix all the time. Fixing the backend would buy them a whole lot more time than the squish is going to, if we do a squish we are going to likely need to do one every expack to stay ahead of the problem.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...59?page=10#195

- - - Updated - - -

Yes, and a variable scale as per my graph won't mess with how iLvl works, it's just a modifier to the data. it can't be a flat scale (eg -200), but rather be a small decrease for lower levels and a high decrease at higher levels. This is what my graphs show.

If you look to how the hand drawn graph they provided for illustrative purposes,(which has possibly changed since then) what they did was basically the following

1-60 leveling gear -> 60 tier gear -> 60-70 leveling gear -> 70 tier gear -> 70-80 leveling gear etc... etc...(got tired of typing that all out you get the idea)
changes to
1-60 leveling gear -> 60-70 leveling gear -> 70-80 leveling gear etc...
with the tier gear running parallel as opposed to being part of the upgrade chain. This will basically squish out all the raid tier iLevel jumps.
(edit: which is also a variable ilevel decrease based on the level of content, the higher the level of your gear the more it is squished)
If they go this route, old raid gear will be ridiculously powerful in low level PvP.

[Deleted]

It's okay that gear gets obsolete. On the other hand it's not okay that it gets obsolete so fast and so much. I don't want to carry over gear to a new expansion. I want to carry over to the next raid tier. Blizzard is shooting themselves in the foot by making gear and raid content obsolete so quickly.

Not only that but I also think linear gear progression is bad (meaning everything from the next tier is just better). It should be more mixed. Like items from old tier end bosses would still be better than the first or trash drops from new raids. Also smaller jumps in item level would be great at least at the beginning of a new patch, so it wouldnt be like new patch, yay! Lets farm heroics and LFR and replace everything!

[Braindwen]

I'm pretty sure there was (infact I know there was a blue post) that explained why it would happen. There was something about the numbers getting so out of hand (on their end for server side things) that it was approaching a limit (iirc) and that it needed to happen.

Best I can come up with is anecdotal evidence on Ra-Den 25. Apparently his health overflowed if you ignored too many anima orbs.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post21588850


On your second point, I really couldn't care less about its effect on soloing (other than, of course, being nerfed sucks). It might be nice not to clear every previous expansion solo by the 2nd raid tier (e.g. finishing up all of DS/FL/BWD/BoT in ToT gear like this expansion). Obviously won't affect soloing current expansion stuff... which already happens, so yeah.

[jbombard]

Not only that but I also think linear gear progression is bad (meaning everything from the next tier is just better). It should be more mixed. Like items from old tier end bosses would still be better than the first or trash drops from new raids. Also smaller jumps in item level would be great at least at the beginning of a new patch, so it wouldnt be like new patch, yay! Lets farm heroics and LFR and replace everything!

It is a hard problem. They want new gear to feel exciting, and they want to push people to the higher modes and when a tier comes out to the next tier. What that means is that if we only had 1 mode we could probably get away with an 8 point iLevel increase per tier. However because we have 4 modes we are seeing huge iLevel increases just in the same tier and when you multiply that by the number of tiers we are seeing a massive increase in just one expansion. They have said time and time again though that they are happy with this and they will only be squishing old content.

[tankbug]

Well fine, make everyone drive at 10% speed on a course that's 1/10th as long (and if you want to be a real stickler, magically make everything else like tires and gas scale down as needed as well). It'd take just as long, but I doubt many people that enjoy it now still would.

No, it's not going to be as enjoyable to hit for 500 as it is to hit for 500,000. I'm glad you say that (since it's hard to know for sure) it won't matter to you. You are not everyone. Try and understand that being nerfed (massively) overnight isn't all that fun. Sure it's relative, and once we forget the good old days where we did hundreds of thousands of damage a hit and had a million health we won't care anymore, but it'll absolutely feel awkward when it happens.

Well, I just suppose I don't watch the numbers as much as the relative power I have to kill things, and I had trouble imagining that it would matter to people if they did 50, 5000 or 50,000,000 damage to a mob or player as long as they die just as fast.

I agree that a slow, short race is less interesting, but I still can't see why that is a fair comparison. Try rather, would you care if you made 1000% more money a year, if everyone else did and the cost became a 1000% higher as well? It won't matter how much you can buy or do, it's just an extra zero on your paycheck. I know I wouldn't. But ok, now I know that some people care about the size of numbers more than the meaning of the numbers. For me, being nerfed is having less ability to defeat my foes.