In a MMO expansion, new gear always offers a noticeable upgrade. But what happens when a MMO goes on forever? World of Warcraft has reached its seventh anniversary, and it will have its fourth expansion pack.
Are the numbers getting out of control?
This is what the Blizzard developers are saying. However, I do not think Ghostcrawler offers an honest argument for both sides. In two options, he uses a satire for one and ‘scientific looking graphs’ for the other. This leads to the post being more about rhetoric than about substance.
He offers two options:
A) Use a term like ‘Mega Damage’ to refer to big numbers. Instead of saying 12 million, it would say 12 ‘Mega Damage’.
B) Squish all the numbers in the game.
But none of this is necessary. WoW players actually like the ‘growth’ of power they get with each expansion and eagerly anticipate what type of old raid content they can then solo with each new expansion.
I don’t accept Ghostcrawler’s premise. With a hypothetical 5.3 and 6.3 item, he uses these as examples:
The premise is that Ghostcrawler says these numbers are ‘ludicrous’. Are they? To whom?
What makes a number ludicrous? Keep in mind that we’re not seeing the full number. Every game number has many numbers after the decimal point. They just aren’t shown. Even Vanilla WoW with its ‘Nature Mastery’ and all ended up having crazy numbers being crunched… but the player never saw them.
In the Real World, people place abbreviations on long numbers. Here is what the numbers would look like with a ‘K’ abbreviation.
Instead of 62,004 armor, it would read:
62 K
(You won’t need to list the 4 because at that level it would be irrelevant.)
Instead of 247179 armor, it would read:
247 K
Players do not need to know the last three digits in such a large number because they don’t make any difference. Armor that is 179 less armor than 247179 will not be felt by the player and likely won’t make any difference since the damage scales up as well.
The number abbreviation retains the integrity of the old content, allows players to feel powerful with the new expansion, and makes the numbers as simple as Vanilla WoW.
Squishing the numbers is no solution because in a couple expansions Blizzard will be in the same spot as they are now. But the solution with abbreviating the numbers with K works today and will work in the future. And it requires minimal work for Blizzard. It is nothing more than just not showing the last three digits.
The issue isn’t about numbers getting big. The issue is about managing the numbers from a player perspective. Players can easily look at 315 K armor and know it is better than 125 K armor. It is a small number to see inside the mind. The ‘mega damage’ symbol doesn’t make sense as there is an abbreviation that is used in the real world to handle large numbers.
Even better is that this is how Blizzard reveals health bar and mana numbers in the game now. Once your bar goes over 100,000, it becomes displayed as 100 K. And no one has any problem with this. The fact that no one has complained about the K or noticed it verifies that it is a solution that works.
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