Update: WoWinsider says “Rather than compressing item levels and retuning seven years’ worth of content, the developers appear to have opted to go with the concept of Mega Damage, replacing a bunch of spare 0s with a K or an M where appropriate. When killing mobs in Pandaria, my four-digit damage was not compressed. If I hit something for 3,000 damage, it displayed as 3,000 damage. However, five-digit numbers and higher were compressed. 30,000 became 30K. It’s a very simple solution and should have very little impact on your gameplay overall.” Just add K. Blizzard actually did it!
Greg Street, “Ghostcrawler, is the designer currently in charge of World of Warcraft. Before he proposed the “Item Squish”. The idea is that because World of Warcraft is so old and the expansions keep adding layers and layers of new tiers and large jumps in stats, the stats are getting ridiculously large. Tanks will have a million health. By the way the blog post was written, it was pretty clear Ghostcrawler and Blizzard had decided on the item squish and ridiculed the other ideas (such as the ‘megadeath’ picture).
Why was this controversial? It is because the change wasn’t just with how the numbers were displayed, it was in how the stats leveled out between expansions. It would make older content more difficult.
Above: The faded is how the stats work now. The clear is the proposed item squish.
Something that occurred in World of Warcraft that Blizzard may not have realized is how old raids are consumed. The usual WoW player has a set raiding time. This raid is almost always the current tier raid. But what do they do between the raids? Mists of Pandaria is designed in such a way to give people things to do between raids.
Old raids are the choice of many people for the downtime. In fact, it has become a reason why many people keep logging on during non-raid days. Only a few Vanilla and Burning Crusade raids are actually soloable. The rest of the raids require multiple people, usually around three unless you talk about the Wrath raids which are around seven or more.
Why would anyone do these old raids? Even though they are trivialized, they are still challenging due to the fact these experiences are always unorganized (pug groups) and have less people than the raid required when it was current content. For example, a caster soloing Molten Core still can be tricky due to the mechanics. You can die if you aren’t careful.
What I believe is so compelling about these old raids is that there is no pressure. Usual raiding has pressure from everyone. But these old raids provide a similar social experience that a current raid does without all the tension. Most people do these old raids for the achievements or mounts. Ever since transmog, they now do them for old gear to transmog on their current gear.
These old raids have become such an important part of the current player experience, and each new expansion is now seen as increasing this pool of old raids to ‘party’ through, it is the reason why the item squish was met with hatred. It felt like Blizzard was taking away the fun. One blogger, for some reason, decided the item squish was a conspiracy theory for Blizzard to make content consumption slower. But why does Blizzard care about content consumption of expansions released so many years ago? Blizzard actually prefers people to go through older content faster because they want people to experience the endgame. It is why old reputations like Timbermaw Hold got nerfed or why the experience required from level 70 to 80 got reduced.
I made a post on this ‘controversy’ saying the simple solution to it was to “Just add K.” What people may not realize is that the numbers you see on the gear is not all the numbers that are there. There are many more numbers not displayed beyond the decimal point. So if a gear has 517 haste, it probably is more like 517.43465 haste. You don’t see what comes after the decimal point because those numbers aren’t necessary for the player to see. Just adding K would be displaying only the relevant numbers and hiding the irrelevant numbers. While in Vanilla, a number like 643 armor was important. But if the armor is 454,643, those last three digits are no longer important for the player to see. If you put 454 K, you clean up the ‘growing numbers’, make things simpler for the player, and you don’t have any controversy.
World of Warcraft was successful because something went right. Changing ALL the stats would anger many people for the nostalgia factor alone. Since World of Warcraft is very much a stacking structure with its content (one expansion stacks on another like a series of stories in a skyscraper), messing with the stats could very well jeopardize the entire integrity of that skyscraper. If people do not like an expansion, they may say, “I don’t like this expansion.” But with such a radical change to every stat in the game, you give these players no place to run or play. This isn’t like updating Vanilla quests and zones (which can be skipped). The Item Squish is not optional and that, itself, is a very big problem.
S: Interesting. So you did a blog post a while ago about the “Great Item Squish (Or Not) of Mists of Pandaria.” I noticed that the combat text was popping up and saying things like “14K” instead of 14,000 or whatever. Is that the route you decided to go with, like the “mega damage” approach?
GS: Yeah, we went with the “not.” Mega Damage, here to stay. So we had this all in and working. We squished everything, and it was working. We had the whole thing implemented, and we sat down and tried it out, and, you know, Mortal Strike hit for 200, and Fireball hit for 150, and we were like, “This feels wrong.” We knew exactly how it would feel like, and we knew that our damage as a percentage didn’t go down, but it felt terrible. And we were like, “Okay, this is now super risky”, because we’re going to change talent trees on players, and even though we think it’s a great design, and we think players will love it, it’s a hard sell. And to do that, and have them hit really wimpy, I think even if players understood why we did it, deep down they wouldn’t like it.
So we decided to back off of that. We’re trying the solution with commas, and K’s, and M’s, and to be honest, it helps a lot, and our hope is, by 6.0 or 7.0, players are demanding the item squish, and by then it’s not controversial at all. It’s like a celebration when we finally do it.
With all the Pandaria news out there today, do you know what I hear from players when I logged on?
11 character slots? No.
Garrosh as final expansion boss? No.
Pandaren females? No.
Seven zones instead of five? No.
Monk class details? No.
Account bound pets? No.
All I heard was this: “NO ITEM SQUISH! HOORAY!”
That was the most exciting thing they got from the Pandaria news. No item squish. They could still play with the old raids in a leisurely way.
This strikes me as significant. Blizzard should sit down and figure out what is so entertaining about these old raids. Water drifts downhill. Is player behavior drifting toward a sort of three man or five man type raids? Is this just players, who were absent or didn’t have the time, ‘catching up’ and getting the achievements and seeing the content they missed? Obviously, this manner of play is very important to the players and Blizzard should investigate why.
One thing Blizzard should keep in mind is that one day, there will be no new expansions and WoW will just be frozen in time. The way how players will behave, at this point, is to actually re-experience the expansions as if they were current content. They will make level 60 twinks and raid Molten Core. I know several groups that already make level 70 twinks or level 80 twinks just to play the Burning Crusade or Wrath raids as if they were current content. It’s their choice to do this. It entertains them. And they aren’t hurting anything.
An item squish would destroy all this. I don’t think Blizzard understands how upset people would be over this. Or maybe they got an idea and backed off.
I believe the ultimate longterm solution would be, as all solutions to gaming problems are, require more work from the developers. I believe the ultimate solution would be in the language.
Blizzard wants to be a global company and is its games in every language it can. Clearly, a Portuguese person should be able to enjoy the game just as an English person should. Like a switch, the language changes in the game.
In the same way, a switch could be used to change the numbers. It could be between Classic and Modern. Classic would be what the numbers are today. But you go to the option menu and select ‘modern’. The modern display would show what the item squish numbers would be.
Let’s talk about the pluses and minuses of this approach. The plus is that everyone can have their cake and eat it too. Both sides get what they want. The minus is that it puts more work on developers (as all solutions put more work on the developers). They have to deal with two sets of numbers now. Or do they? If it is truly an item squish, then the Classic numbers would be automatically adjusted to the modern numbers.
This would preserve the integrity of the classic game for those who wish it. It would also allow people to see less numbers using the ‘Modern’ way. And an additional plus is that when it comes time to Item Squish again, the ‘Modern’ way is merely updated instead of wreaking havoc with every number in the game all over again. To me, this solution is cleaner and elegant than anything else.
“But what about database sites like WoWhead?” What about them? They could include an option to change the display for the user from Classic numbers to Modern numbers.
I believe solutions to controversial decisions in gaming are best solved by allowing gamers the power to solve it to their own tastes. It is important for the gamers to choose how they wish to play. If there is a way they can choose how they wish to play without interfering with other players, they should be allowed to do so.
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