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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 7 of 10)
ukwest Nov 4th 2011 3:44PM
@piper
Damage calculations and other RNG fight mechanics are done on the server side. Our machines just make the pretty pixels and display the server results.
kL Nov 4th 2011 4:21PM
You could easily solve the solo'ing problem in dungeons by providing a buff to players in said dungeon by x*(level) as they did in ICC. Thus keeping the people in the dungeons happy and the PVP'ers happy because a level 85 doesn't get smashed by a level 90-95 doing 1.2M damage in crossroads. Its absurd.
This way I can go back and solo Rag, but fortunately at level 60 I can run away from said level 90 with out getting hit by a white attack.
Piper Nov 4th 2011 4:47PM
@ukwest, True, I was thinking on the client side.
Ghostcrawler said, "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."
It was the "PCs" part that got me thinking on the client side. Still, obviously the amount of computations is a problem for the server side.
loop_not_defined Nov 4th 2011 5:40PM
A bunch of level 60s don't stand much of a chance against a level 80 simply because of how hit % works. It's based off of level, which won't be changing. Squishing would have little noticeable effect.
loop_not_defined Nov 4th 2011 6:01PM
Also, current-expansion end game ilvls will rise just as dramatically as they do now. But *only* for current-expansion gear. If you think level 90 players won't be able to one-shot level 80 players (maybe not level 85 players), I think you're severely overestimating the power reduction of item squishing, or misunderstood how it will function.
Only "end game" ilvls for old expansions would be squished, per Ghostcrawler's blog. MC through AQ, TK through Sunwell, Naxx through ICC, BT through DS.
RS Nov 4th 2011 1:43PM
A vote in favor of the great item level squish.
Smaller numbers = faster processing. Sure it's nano-seconds, but across 10 million players in {x} number of fights...that's a lot of time.
over 100K health on my toon? ridiculous. 30-40K was good.
just my .02
RS Nov 4th 2011 1:45PM
caveat... extreme soloing.....
I like soloing old content... Item squish? Please allow that to continue to be possible.
matt Nov 4th 2011 2:12PM
extreme solo and ilvl squish cannot go together, you have to pick one.
RS Nov 4th 2011 2:43PM
mutually exclusive?
crap.
I dunno then,
maybe a level buff for older content. you're level 90? and not in level 90 content? great you get a +X% buff for every NPC 5 levels below you.
so when soloing level 70 raids you get +20% buff. to make you "super-saiyan" against them.
Wouldn't work against newest raids....
Allows for item level squish and extreme soloing?
Just an idea.
Deathknighty Nov 4th 2011 3:00PM
Seriously. The squish is not necessary. They can solve this really, really easily, by rounding everything to, let's say 5 significant figures. So, instead of your poor computer having to figure out what 101194759437949473948-493984972 is, it can work out what 1011900000000000000000-493980000 is.
Simplez!
RS Nov 4th 2011 3:13PM
I don't see that helping.
your PC. server, whatever still has to compute a huge number with another.
if you actually lopped off the last 6 digits, now your making some headway, simply making them 0?
12345678901234567 - 1234567890 would become 123456789 -123,
rounding everything to 0?
12345678900000000 -1230000000 = another insane number to round.
Those 0's are taking up computational space.
styopa Nov 4th 2011 1:44PM
Squish the stats, AND come up with an ongoing plan for moving forward.
For example, look at his post-squish graph...Cata is STILL broken!
Personally, I think they could take the square root of the current values, that alone would take out the exponential growth.
+1 stays +1
+10 turns into +3
+100 turns into +10
and +1000 turns into +31....a far more reasonable scale.
The problem is of course precisely what GC merely alludes to: dropping your +10 item for a +20, easy choice. Dropping the +10 for a +11? Not so much, when you have all sorts of other mechanics involved, is that +1 stat worth a slight loss in dps, etc?
Let's remember that this is a business. Currently that business is about keeping people willing to pay $15/mo to play in their virtual world, and the main motivation right now is to pick up new shinies. If new shiny isn't a compelling reward, people will stop seeing shiny-seeking as interesting.
Now, I'd personally assert that simple shiny-seeking has ALREADY lost some of its attraction. That's part of the subscription issue over the past 9 months.
So while I recognize GC's problem, it's not just a question of what slope do item buffs follow - it's "Is there a slope for item buffs that both ends in a non-absurd place yet remains compelling and interesting for players to continue to enjoy climbing?"
That's damn hard, as even a % growth by ilvl (probably the mathematically easiest method to get off the exponential growth) turns a corner and eventually goes nearly vertical over any series. So it's not a permanent solution.
Perhaps the answer is to abandon fixed bonuses per item in any case. What if instead of +FLAT STR BONUS on that item, you'd see a +%STR? (Where % is % of your base stat and your stats go up every level.) It doesn't solve the mega-damage issue, but it does make a 1-point improvement meaningful again, all the time.
Personally, I *like* the idea if the game wasn't decided by how big & shiny your sword is, but how good a player you are, but I understand I'm the minority.
kingoomieiii Nov 4th 2011 1:54PM
Ratings USED to be %... but a percentage means that gear every expansion has to have higher percentage numbers than before.
In vanilla, Blackhand's Breadth gave 2% crit. It was a level 60 trinket. With the release of patch 2.0 (the introduction of stat ratings), it was changed to 28 crit rating, which is 2% crit at level 60.
If it had stayed percentage, the only upgrade would have been a 3% crit trinket. And it would have to be like a 63 green. Raiding would have had to have a 5% crit trinket. Wrath, 7% crit trinket. Cata, 12%. They went with ratings so numbers could increase without players getting up near 100% stats (they did anyway at the end of Wrath, because they added two more tiers of gear than they expected to).
% STR means that each tier needs to grant a higher %... AND the next expansion needs to go even higher. The scaling would be worse, and less manageable, than what we have now.
styopa Nov 4th 2011 2:21PM
@ king:
Sure, I remember Blackhand's 2% crit. But the tricky bit is that Blizzard didn't MEAN % like everyone normally thinks of %. Blizz has always had a hit-table based system, which is mechanically prone to out-of-bounds conditions. In fact, exceptionally so.
So "2%" in "blizzard system speak" didn't mean your chance to crit increased by a mathematical 2%. It meant that your crit chance moved up the chart 2 ticks. If your inherent crit % was 3%, that moved up to 5% (or, mathematically, a 67% increase)! Moreover, this 'pushed' all the other results on the table further up. So if you had a 25% chance of missing, a 70% chance of hitting, and a 5% chance of critting, adding 2% crit would make these then 23/70/7, leading (eventually) to people first never missing, and then in absurd situations, only critting. Clearly broken.
Now, if Blizz just had gone to a (to me) simpler math-based system, B'sB wouldn't have been the destabilizing item it was. If your inherent crit % was 5.0%, a 2% increase to that would increase it to 5.1%.
If all items' buffs were serially multiplicative, the system is much more robust and tolerates some pretty massive numbers before things get broken.
Let's say your to-hit was 75%, and your chance to crit was 5%.
Original Blizzard Tables: Carrying 15x '+2%' items meant that you never missed, your chance to hit was 65, and your chance to crit was 35.
Multiplicative method: Carrying 15x '+2%' inly increases your crit to 6.7%. Carrying FIFTY of them only raises it to a still-reasonable 13.4%.
So no, B'sB wasn't at fault, Blizzard's fundamental mechanics were at fault, and still are.
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 4:12PM
@styopa:
First, you very much misunderstand WoW's combat table if you think ANYTHING can push misses off the table. Misses are only removed directly for this very reason. For someone who had that combat table it looked like:
Miss: 1-25
Crit: 26-30
Hit: 31+
So when you add 2% to crit, the table then becomes:
Miss: 1-25
Crit: 26-32
Hit: 33+
This is why rogues ran into the crit cap late in Wrath; they'd made the 'Hit' portion of the table to read "Hit: 101+" while only rolling a d100.
Consider: Assume the item under discussion was designed to boost a 5% crit chance to a 7% crit chance. In your system, that's a +40% crit chance. If you've got two items that do that, you're now up to a 9.8% crit chance. A third? 13.72%. Meanwhile, Blizzard's system (either the old one or the new one) would take four similar items to make it to only 13%.
Geometric progressions get real nasty, once they get big enough to be noticeable. It's worth pointing out that in your stack of fifty +2% bonuses, #50 offered more than two and a half times the benefit of #1. And it doesn't level off, or slow down. It just keeps accelerating.
Jaq Nov 4th 2011 1:46PM
IMO, the numbers didn't get out of hand until Cata, where my DK in his DPS spec went from 34K at level 80 to 110K at level 85 in greens. MoP needs to get that under control, or we'll be sitting at 500K health and have toons with 35,000 AP. The "great squish" seems good in theory, but a lot of people will log in and see their 212K health back down to lower than level 80 numbers and think "why'd I bother with Cata then?", not taking into account that a level 90 mob won't have 300K health.
Getting how gear scales under control seems like a good idea, but I'm not sure rolling everything back solves it, it just pushes back having to rework the stat system to another day.
kingoomieiii Nov 4th 2011 1:47PM
IF YOU TAKE AWAY MY ABILITY TO SOLO OLD STUFF BY SCALING ME DOWN TO BC LEVELS, I WILL CRIT YOU FOR 600 DAMAGE
DarkWalker Nov 4th 2011 1:48PM
The disadvantage of the stat compression scheme is that, a couple expansions in the future, WoW would be in the same spot as it is today and Blizzard would have to do that again.
The only sustainable answer would be to stop doing logarithmic number increases, and instead do linear increases, changing the underlying math to support it.
It's the way most pen and paper RPG systems deal with power increases. Some even have quite interesting ideas to keep numbers in check while allowing real character power to drastically increase - a number of them, such as M&M, Storyteller, Storytelling, etc, even manage to make common humans and beings of cosmical power have the same number of HP.
Some computer and video game RPGs also use linear systems. Pokemon, for example.
BTW:
"""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."""
I really can't agree with this. What is the harm in allowing players that want to skip some content to actually skip that content? Besides, the current stat increase speed in WoW means content becomes absolutely non-challenging if the player has gear one or more tiers above what was expected for the content, making playing through old content almost like using god mode in a game.
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 5:15PM
Agreed on having to do it again.
The problem with comparing WoW to any non-MMO RPGs (PnP or computer) is that pretty much all of them have a point where they say "This is as strong as the character can get." Your character either stops learning, and (at least for the PnP ones) they often explicitly tell you that adding more levels/power to the character breaks the game system.
Pokemon caps the monsters at level 100, and expands the game by adding more, different monsters, more and different abilities, refining game systems, and every now and again adding alternate methods of advancement (see: beauty contests).
For WoW? Every expansion they bump the level cap. Every major patch they add more powerful gear. I don't think it's possible to have any sort of permanent solution without gutting the gear treadmill. And that means you have to have some other way to gate your content (assuming you still decide that that's a good idea) and some other compelling way to reward players for succeeding.
busuan Nov 4th 2011 1:51PM
I remember beginning days into WoW from Diablo II, I felt absolutely pitiful at my characters' puny damage output, white 1-3, and crit 2-5.
I think the solution would be to make an internal damage system that is linearly/logarithmically proportional to character/gear levels, with a fully normalized damage-reporting system as its shell. Health points would have a normalized shell too.