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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGhostcrawler details potential solutions for gear inflation
by Adam Holisky 
Nov 4th 2011 at 1:00PM
Item inflation is the continually increasing numbers we see on gear, getting larger and larger each expansion. Eventually (perhaps even now, according to some), the numbers become so large that they become difficult at a glance to make quick computational decisions about.
Is the difference between 1,600,000 and 1,400,000 health really concerning or not? Probably not, at least in terms of percentages, but the loss of 200,000 health is something that makes you stop and think for a second -- and in a raid, that second might be the time you wipe.
Ghostcrawler has detailed two potential plans to deal with this inflation in a new blog post.
Mega damage In what sounds like a nod to scientific notation, numbers would be visually collapsed into easier-to-consume units. So instead of 5,000 strength, you'd have 5K strength, or instead of 1,500,000 HP, you'd have 1.5M HP. This is what Blizzard does for bosses now, and it'd expand the system to player numbers and other stats.
Another way to think of it: Instead of launching a Shadow Bolt that does 12,000,000 damage, you'd do 12 Mega Damage instead.
The Great Item Level Squish The second possible solution Ghostcrawler outlined is an item level squish, where all item level increases at the end of expansions are squished down. (Inflation occurs mostly at the end of expansions, where the gear increases greatly with each content patch.) This would have the effect of reducing numbers across the spectrum, so a player before MoP might have 200,000 health, and then when MoP launches, he might have only 20,000 health. Item levels and assorted numbers would be squished, potentially quite dramatically.
Ghostcrawler makes a big point, and we're going to put it in bold: These are just possible solutions and might not even be the ones Blizzard goes with in the end. So don't kiss your tank's massive HP goodbye just yet.
Ghostcrawler's full post, after the break.
Is the difference between 1,600,000 and 1,400,000 health really concerning or not? Probably not, at least in terms of percentages, but the loss of 200,000 health is something that makes you stop and think for a second -- and in a raid, that second might be the time you wipe.
Ghostcrawler has detailed two potential plans to deal with this inflation in a new blog post.
Mega damage In what sounds like a nod to scientific notation, numbers would be visually collapsed into easier-to-consume units. So instead of 5,000 strength, you'd have 5K strength, or instead of 1,500,000 HP, you'd have 1.5M HP. This is what Blizzard does for bosses now, and it'd expand the system to player numbers and other stats.
Another way to think of it: Instead of launching a Shadow Bolt that does 12,000,000 damage, you'd do 12 Mega Damage instead.
The Great Item Level Squish The second possible solution Ghostcrawler outlined is an item level squish, where all item level increases at the end of expansions are squished down. (Inflation occurs mostly at the end of expansions, where the gear increases greatly with each content patch.) This would have the effect of reducing numbers across the spectrum, so a player before MoP might have 200,000 health, and then when MoP launches, he might have only 20,000 health. Item levels and assorted numbers would be squished, potentially quite dramatically.
Ghostcrawler makes a big point, and we're going to put it in bold: These are just possible solutions and might not even be the ones Blizzard goes with in the end. So don't kiss your tank's massive HP goodbye just yet.
Ghostcrawler's full post, after the break.
Ghostcrawler
The lead designers were originally going to talk about this topic at BlizzCon, but it didn't really match the content of the rest of our "Intro to Pandaria" presentation, and seeing as how we finished our 90-minute slot with 93 seconds remaining, there wouldn't have been room for it anyway. But several of us did bring up the issue with players and media we talked to, and it even ended up in at least one FAQ, so we figured we'd go ahead and get the information out there. Note that unlike much of what we presented for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion, this is not an announcement. It's more of a problem we'd like to address, and a couple of ways we potentially might do so. Feedback is certainly appreciated.
Big Number Syndrome
Hey, our stats are growing exponentially. If you look at everything from the Strength on a weapon to the damage being done by a Fireball crit or the amount of health the Morchok boss has, they look downright absurd compared to the numbers for level 60 characters in the original shipping version of World of Warcraft. It's not exactly a surprise that we were going to end up here, and we knew where we were going every step of the way, yet regardless, here we are.
The numbers grew so much primarily because we wanted rewards to be compelling. Upgrading from a chestpiece that has 50 Strength into one that has 51 Strength is undeniably a DPS increase for the appropriate user, but it's not a very exciting reward. Such negligible increases can drive players to do some weird things, such as skipping over tiers of gear or entire levels of content. This is particularly relevant when we're talking about a new expansion. We don't want level-85 players to have a reasonable shot at level-90 dungeons and raids (or PvP opponents) just because that content is balanced for gear that isn't much better than what the level-85 players have.
So we arrived at this point in a logical fashion, and we don't really think we should have handled things any differently. However, it's still a weird place to be, and it's about to get weirder. These aren't real items, in that we don't know for sure what the item levels will be in patch 5.3 and patch 6.3 (if only we planned that far ahead!) but they are reasonable guesses, and you can see just how ridiculous the items look.
So what do we do about it? There are two general categories of solutions. The first is to make the numbers appear more manageable and the second is to actually change the numbers.
Mega Damage
The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the "Mega Damage solution" because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo).
If we can make numbers such as floating combat text and boss health and item stats a little easier to read at a glance, then maybe we can endure numbers increasing exponentially for many digits to come. Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can't quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we'd have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters.
Item Level Squish
The second solution actually involves compressing item levels, which is why we call it the "item level squish solution." If we can lower stats on items, then we can lower every other number in the game as well, such as how much damage a Fireball does or how much health a gronn has. If you look at the item level curves, you can see that most of the growth occurs at the maximum character levels for the various expansions. This is because we keep rewarding more and more powerful gear to make the new raid tier and PvP season in an expansion reward significantly better gear than the previous one. However, those huge item level jumps don't accomplish a lot once the character level has increased again. Very few players notice or care how much of an upgrade the Black Temple loot is over the Serpentshrine Cavern loot when their characters are level 80.
With that in mind, we could go back and compress the big item level increases that occur at level 60, 70, 80 and 85. The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially from patch to patch, but the baselines would be a lot lower. Health could go from 150,000 back down to something like 20,000. The big risk of this approach is that players will log into the new expansion and feel nerfed... even if all the other numbers are compressed as well.
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.
I came up with an analogy -- even though I know logically that people drive on the left side of the street in the UK (we drive on the right side of the street in the US) and wouldn't be surprised to see it, it would still feel really disorienting if I was driving in the UK and had to make a right-hand turn.
So Now What?
As I type this today, we haven't decided on which if either solution we want to try. Maybe we'll come up with yet another solution. Maybe it's the kind of thing we can put off for another expansion so that players don't have to adjust to the new talent system and a drastic item level compression at the same time. Or maybe it's better just to pull the Band-Aid off fast and fix everything at once. Time will tell. I did, however, want to outline the problem lest any of you believe we don't think there is a problem. There is. We're just not sure of the best solution yet. If your answer is that stat budgets don't have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise, and thus these proposed solutions exist. Your thoughts on the matter are valuable.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. The last time he used "Fig. 5" in an article, it related fish predation to estuarine hydrocarbon contamination.
Big Number Syndrome
Hey, our stats are growing exponentially. If you look at everything from the Strength on a weapon to the damage being done by a Fireball crit or the amount of health the Morchok boss has, they look downright absurd compared to the numbers for level 60 characters in the original shipping version of World of Warcraft. It's not exactly a surprise that we were going to end up here, and we knew where we were going every step of the way, yet regardless, here we are.
The numbers grew so much primarily because we wanted rewards to be compelling. Upgrading from a chestpiece that has 50 Strength into one that has 51 Strength is undeniably a DPS increase for the appropriate user, but it's not a very exciting reward. Such negligible increases can drive players to do some weird things, such as skipping over tiers of gear or entire levels of content. This is particularly relevant when we're talking about a new expansion. We don't want level-85 players to have a reasonable shot at level-90 dungeons and raids (or PvP opponents) just because that content is balanced for gear that isn't much better than what the level-85 players have.
So we arrived at this point in a logical fashion, and we don't really think we should have handled things any differently. However, it's still a weird place to be, and it's about to get weirder. These aren't real items, in that we don't know for sure what the item levels will be in patch 5.3 and patch 6.3 (if only we planned that far ahead!) but they are reasonable guesses, and you can see just how ridiculous the items look.
So what do we do about it? There are two general categories of solutions. The first is to make the numbers appear more manageable and the second is to actually change the numbers.
Mega Damage
The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the "Mega Damage solution" because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo).
If we can make numbers such as floating combat text and boss health and item stats a little easier to read at a glance, then maybe we can endure numbers increasing exponentially for many digits to come. Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can't quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we'd have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters.
Item Level Squish
The second solution actually involves compressing item levels, which is why we call it the "item level squish solution." If we can lower stats on items, then we can lower every other number in the game as well, such as how much damage a Fireball does or how much health a gronn has. If you look at the item level curves, you can see that most of the growth occurs at the maximum character levels for the various expansions. This is because we keep rewarding more and more powerful gear to make the new raid tier and PvP season in an expansion reward significantly better gear than the previous one. However, those huge item level jumps don't accomplish a lot once the character level has increased again. Very few players notice or care how much of an upgrade the Black Temple loot is over the Serpentshrine Cavern loot when their characters are level 80.
With that in mind, we could go back and compress the big item level increases that occur at level 60, 70, 80 and 85. The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially from patch to patch, but the baselines would be a lot lower. Health could go from 150,000 back down to something like 20,000. The big risk of this approach is that players will log into the new expansion and feel nerfed... even if all the other numbers are compressed as well.
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.
I came up with an analogy -- even though I know logically that people drive on the left side of the street in the UK (we drive on the right side of the street in the US) and wouldn't be surprised to see it, it would still feel really disorienting if I was driving in the UK and had to make a right-hand turn.
So Now What?
As I type this today, we haven't decided on which if either solution we want to try. Maybe we'll come up with yet another solution. Maybe it's the kind of thing we can put off for another expansion so that players don't have to adjust to the new talent system and a drastic item level compression at the same time. Or maybe it's better just to pull the Band-Aid off fast and fix everything at once. Time will tell. I did, however, want to outline the problem lest any of you believe we don't think there is a problem. There is. We're just not sure of the best solution yet. If your answer is that stat budgets don't have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise, and thus these proposed solutions exist. Your thoughts on the matter are valuable.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. The last time he used "Fig. 5" in an article, it related fish predation to estuarine hydrocarbon contamination.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 10)
DarkWalker Nov 4th 2011 6:26PM
For those that are asking how the "squish" will affect low levels: judging by the graphics GC provided, up to lv60, not at all. My guess is that the idea is to make iLvl = needed character level, for green gear at least, up to lv85. I.e., Cata's green gear that require character level 85 would be iLvl 85. And, from this point, the dev team would recalculate all mob stats.
The issue with soloing old content is that a level 85 character would have stats about 50% higher than a level 60 character, instead of stats dozens of times higher as is the case now.
Fast stat increases would resume after level 85, in the MoP content. (which also means soloing old content as a lv90 with raid gear should be again possible, BTW)
Kelgair Nov 4th 2011 1:31PM
Mega damage? Do Glitter Boy's come in Tauren variants?! :P
Shrikesnest Nov 4th 2011 7:21PM
I can't decide if a Tauren glitterboy would have a gargantuan suit made of twigs, leaves and mud, or just a coat of war paint and a huge gun.
Psiwave Nov 4th 2011 1:31PM
Am I the only person that can't see what the issue is?
If numbers get too big stick a K on the combat text.
I don't understand how bigger numbers can be 'confusing' , does it matter that a lvl 85 char has 100x the health of a lvl 60? When is that going to make a difference to gameplay? If they were trying to make old content relevant then fine, but as it stands it's surely a non-issue.
LynMars Nov 4th 2011 1:41PM
From my limited understanding: It's starting to be an issue with computation of values and balancing. Even the computers can't keep up with the number crunching in a raid situation when you start putting too many zeroes at the end of everyone's numbers. It also gets clunky for devs and players both, and highlights that the power curve has gotten too drastic.
A lvl 58 goes to Outland, gets some gear, and comes back to utterly blast quests of his level in old zones--or other players in PvP. Because that gear is meant to almost instantly replace higher ilvl gear from the previous iteration of the game. And it keeps going upward like that.
In trying to avoid one programming issue, they created another for themselves, and to a lesser degree, to players who have to deal with the end results. There are also a lot of players who for various reasons dislike the artificial inflation of the power curve. It partially exists to force people into quest greens before they go into the new expac's endgame, but also it contributes to a really messy stat balance.
thedoctor2031 Nov 4th 2011 1:46PM
A lot comes down to players "feeling" too powerful. I have as much health as an old raid boss, makes things kind of inflated. It also makes things harder to look at a glance. you do 126925 dps, and it makes individual numbers seem even less meaningful.
Krytture Nov 4th 2011 1:53PM
I wish they would continue the levels as if the raids never happened. If the last lvl 85 quest you did gave you ilvl 300, then when MoP comes out, the first quest green you get should be ilvl 319 or whatever jumps they are doing this time around.
So if you raided to end game content in Cata, and have ilvl 400, then you might not even need to use any quest greens to reach lvl 90. But you still have to reach 90 before you can start hitting the Heroics, and at or even before that point, the gear should start beating even Heroic Deathwing gear.
kingoomieiii Nov 4th 2011 1:56PM
I don't look at stat numbers anymore. They don't mean anything. Itemlevel (three digits) and the KINDS of secondary stats on an item determine its worth to me.
DarkWalker Nov 4th 2011 2:41PM
@LynMars:
Computationally, there are performance barriers when signed numbers (i.e., those that can be both positive and negative) go outside some specific value ranges, for example:
-127 to 128 (8 bits)
-32,767 to 32,768 (16 bits)
-2,147,483,647 to 2,147,483,648 (32 bits; incidentally, the gold cap in coppers)
Judging by GC's post, if any value in the WoW engine ever crosses that 10 digit threshold, they might have problems - and, as he said, tank threat is already hitting that value in some encounters (and, apparently, being capped there; which means there is already imprecision added to the combat engine from some values growing too much).
Texicles Nov 4th 2011 4:41PM
@Krytture
While there's some merit to your suggestion, that model has been tried before. I've had guildies who played since vanilla talk about keeping some of their T3 all the way to 70. The sentiment I've seen from both the community and the devs was that that situation was kinda lame. It detracted most or all of the value from quest rewards in the new xpac.
I can't speak for everyone, but I personally get at least a little flutter of joy from getting a quest reward upgrade, even though I know it will be replaced soon. There's something satisfying about seeing what I'm going to get for collecting these bear asses and thinking about being even more powerful (by however slim a margin) when I go out to dig through poop at the next quest hub.
@ the inflation problem
I am in favor of the squish. I'm no "robot unicorn math dragon" but I have faith that some of those work for Blizz, and hope that, whatever the reverse scaling procedure, that old content would remain soloable, at least to some degree approaching what it is now.
Nina Katarina Nov 4th 2011 1:31PM
One of the depressing things about levelling immediately post-Cata was running into diminishing returns on stats, when suddenly my hitcapped raidgeared mage was doing 3-5k less than she was before, just by gaining a level. Nobody likes to feel like they're getting "better" gear but getting less powerful.
I'm seeing a lot of support for the Great Squish in the comments on GC's post, which kinda surprises me. But the more I think of it, the more sense it makes to me.
One thing it will do is devalue the twinks. I know several people who have XP-locked alts and endlessly try to put together Black Temple runs, or ICC runs, in order to twink out their toons for PVP. Reducing the disparity between end-expansion raid rewards and fresh-85 greens will make for a bit less fun on the twinking circuit.
Nyold Nov 4th 2011 2:02PM
I knew I wasn't just imagining it. In the beginning days of T11 raids, if you can put out 10k dps, you're considered "decent."
But wait a second, weren't we putting out 12-14k dps in the days of ICC?
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 2:52PM
Yeah, level 80 decked out in Cataclysm greens was the most powerful a non-raider's characters were ever likely to be. The decrease in the effectiveness of the various ratings on the jaunt from 80 to 85 was brutal, to put it mildly. It was the flipside to the absurd HP growth we saw in Cataclysm.
If you flatten the item level gap between expansions, you also make the ratings conversions less jumpy; you'll still get less crit from crit rating each time you ding, but your better gear from questing should at least hold you more-or-less steady, instead of watching your crit% effectively jump down a deep hole.
Yoland Nov 4th 2011 1:36PM
The solution to players feeling they have been nerfed is to just do both! Do the iLevel compression, and then add an "M!" for MEGA! to the end of every single number in the game.
...
I meant that as a joke, but, it's scarily logical now that I think of it...
Rem Nov 4th 2011 1:38PM
So in the number squish scenario, we'd see not only stats on our gear lowered, but all the stats in the game lowered (the millions of health on bosses, the expertise and hit caps, the haste caps, etc.) by a set percentage? Or whatever amount was decided upon by the design team.
For the first month I think that'd feel extremely strange, since I'd be so used to feeling "powerful", but so long as everything else was lowered with me, I'd get used to it eventually. One of the bonuses of a new expansion that I'm really looking forward to is the improved numbers on gear, because outgearing an old raid is usually the only way I get to see it; small group of friends + not the best player in the world = I don't see a lot of raids/raid achievements/mounts. So as long as the option of facestomping old raids and heroics in order to at least experience them remains, I'd wholeheartedly accept a stat decrease.
I'd take Ks and Ms over "mega damage", however, because the mega damage would become a new modifier on top of regular and familiar numbers and numbering systems, which could potentially be confusing once you reach that plateau.
trefpoid Nov 4th 2011 1:38PM
I don't mind them reducing our health and stats at all, I just want to be able to solo old stuff the same as todaym so I can keep camping Kael'thas for Al'ar :(
matt Nov 4th 2011 2:05PM
you will not be able to, the whole point of the squish is to decrease the relative power difference between a level 85s in t12 and level 70 in T5. The reason you can solo old content is because there is a massive relative power gain. people who say otherwise are failing at math.
gewalt Nov 4th 2011 3:55PM
you wont be able to and thats (in most peoples eyes) a good thing.
See, those people don't LIKE the fact that we can solo old raids.
I happen to like solo'ng old content alot (I do mc on 4 toons a week, just finished thunderfury on a druid. cause I could. eye hasnt dropped yet tho. sigh.)
But other people think its a very bad thing that players are now as strong as a 40 man raid boss. Suspension of disbelief has failed them at this point.
I disagree with their opinion, but I understand where it comes from.
Muse Nov 4th 2011 4:24PM
So old raids would actually be a challenge, and the gear wouldn't be entirely crappy compared to the other tiers around it.
Y'know, this could actually work out.
Bellajtok Nov 4th 2011 1:38PM
I'd rather drop down to the hundreds and work my way back up to the thousands, instead of abbreviating the numbers so they look like double-digit numbers (plus a letter).