How to design a game to avoid number inflation: suggestion to developers

Community General Discussion
1

For sensible reasons, WoW has exponential scaling of new content. This causes number inflation which has to be addressed every several expansions by flattening NPC health and item levels for legacy expansions. This feels cheap, weird, and destructive. Something of value appears to be lost when previous expansions are flattened.

This can be avoided by making gear item level, and NPC damage and health, vectors, instead of scalars. You hide the scaling by tagging each mob and gear piece by the expansion to which it belongs, and applying power accordingly.

In this design, a piece of gear from Expansion 3 would give you its nominal power in Expansion 3 content, but an extra boost if you go back to Expansion 2. Conversely: a piece of gear from Expansion 2 would give reduced power in the next Expansion 3.

Instead of having gear item levels 1-300 (Expansion 1), 300-600 (Expansion 2), 600-900 (Expansion 3), you have gear item levels {1, 1-300}, {2, 1-300} and {3, 1-300}. Then you never reach item level 1000, and never have to flatten previous item levels.

Same happens to NPC health. Instead of having bosses range from 1 million to 10 million (expansion 1), 20 million to 200 million (expansion 2), 400 million to 4 billion (expansion 3), you would have:

  • {1, 1 million to 10 million}
  • {2, 1 million to 10 million}
  • {3, 1 million to 10 million}

You would obviously not be able to tackle NPCs of {3, abc} with {1, xyz} gear.

I still remember when I started playing the game and the elite Icecrown Citadel item level was 264. Now I go back to that place, and the gear drops are item levels from some strange universe I don’t recognize.

This can be avoided. Just mark that gear {3, 264}. Then I can still go to Icecrown with Midnight quest greens that are item level {12, 100}, and one-shot everything.

For the user, the displayed item level would not look like {3, 264} or {1, 100}. It would be displayed as “264 (WotLK)” or “100 (Midnight)”.

Instead of applying another stat squish, UNDO the previous stat squishes. Restore the original NPC health and item levels. Make them vectors instead of scalars, and apply power accordingly.

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2

This only appears to happen because people are so terrible at math. It is not the size of the numbers that matter, it is the comparison of the numbers. For example: Say that

  • The boss is 250 and you are 200. That is the same as if
  • The boss is 250,000 and you are 200,000. Or
  • The boss is 250,000,000 and you are 200,000,000

That 250,000 can be shortened to 250k and
That 250,000,000 can be shortened to 250m and no one even notices.

The squish is all kind of silly.

1 Like
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It’s usually necessary. I have a feeling our performance lag many have been experiencing is because of the big numbers we have been putting up. I know this was an issue the devs saw going from Legion to BfA.

Regardless we will pretty much always have to have a squish every couple of expansions.

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I couldnt care less

5

FF14, often hailed as ‘better than wow’, also has stat squishes. Just sayin.

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For me, this is hard to parse visually. You start with suffixes K, M, G/B, T, then what? You have to start making up letters that no one uses, even in science. “Hey bro, what’s bigger again, 10W or 9Z?”

It creates a disconnect. I go back to old content which now feels alien. I remember item levels for 10-man and 25-man ICC being different. Now they’re some strange number. I can’t tell the items apart. The squished item levels are the same. Relationships with item levels in other expansions are weird and unexpected.

It feels off, like I cannot return to places I remember. They have been substituted with an alternate reality.

Retention of the past is a significant reason why some people play this game, instead of other games.

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How? A computer takes the same amount of time to divide 250,000 by 175,000 as it does dividing 250 by 175. What difference would that make?

Actually, they could use x1, x2, x3, or xn where each x was an exponent and each n represented 10 to the n*3 power.

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8

ESO does this. The stats on a level 45 item for example peak at 45 and depreciate as you gain more levels while the world itself stays the same.

But it’s simplified because they don’t have to worry about depreciating gear from previous patches in their gearing model; even in new expansions all the old gear still goes to max level. It’s like if your spec’s BiS set in Midnight was from Black Temple in TBC (you don’t have to refarm it though).

Item scaling by itself is a logical approach, but with WoW’s patch cycle it would feel awful to lose power and have to reclaim it rather than feeling more powerful every patch.

At most I’d think they could establish a scaling baseline on xpac to xpac basis but the feeling of going “back in power a whole expansion” could be debilitating even though logically there’s no real difference. You’re left dealing with an emotional response that is still very real and relevant to creating content for an audience. And it’d just be squishing power instead of stats; same dif but feels worse.

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9

Or people just choose weird hang-ups because they look for reasons to be upset.

10

Its both a community issue and a developer problem with a game that has to constantly go up instead of flatten out towards end game. WoW has very much been a “play the patch” game since the end of WotLK and the dopamine rush of constantly replacing your gear keeps people engaged and subbed hence why I said its a community problem as well.

This is also why we will continue getting a turbo boost moving forward now because it drives engagement up.

A more horizontal progression system that games like Guild Wars 2 does would completely solve the number squish issue. Sim dps in that game has went from around 30k to 50k in 13 years. Do keep in mind this is an unrealistic live play dps number. Stats for base HP, secondaries etc… have remained relatively flat.

BUT…

with how dopamine driven the WoW community is with gear this is not possible for the game sadly.

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