Monday, November 7, 2011

WoW: The Great Item Squish

MMO-champion has a blue post on the homepage addressing problem that has been lurking in the background of WoW since the first expansion: For how long will stat / damage numbers continue to increase? It's an interesting problem, and I wonder what others think about the situation and how they would solve it. Blizzard offers two solutions:

1) Mega Damage: Damage and stats would continue to increase at exponential levels, but instead of a fireball doing 6,000,000 damage, it would do 6 MEGA DAMAGE.

2) Item Level Squish: Reduce all stats in the game (characters, mobs, bosses, gear) to more manageable levels.

1 seems like a silly solution. Why not just display the 6,000,000 damage number if a character does 6,000,000 damage? 2 seems sensible, but creates a problematic aesthetic for the gameworld. We already have the problem of greens replacing purples every expansion. Now we'd have another reversion of progress by lowering the numbers every few expansions. Right now with all of my stats I have, say, +7,000 to spell damage. It seems weird that a new expansion, offering progress and increase to my character, would also revert my numbers to put me at +700 or +70 spell damage.

The number reversion solution also creates an interesting compression problem at the lower end of the game. If the lowest level mobs in starting zones have, say, 50 health do we compress them down to 5, to keep them in scale with the high-end boss health decrease? If so, wouldn't this create a problem after two or three world-wide stat compressions?

Something to think / talk about if it interests you: If you created a game that utilized stat increase as a game mechanic, then how would you deal with the exponential increase in stats over time?

61 comments:

Unknown said...

It's a similar problem that always pissed me off about dragonball z. The numbers get to a point that they just don't make sense anymore in the universe in which they exist.

_J_ said...

I think the final spirit bomb in Dragonball GT did something like double-infinite damage, and killed God, or some shit.

Roscoe said...

It's the problem of MTG sets and power creep....

Thing is, there, they've created a planned obsolescence scenario where they can scale power back for a series of sets, while the nuts stuff slides off Type 2.


I wonder how that could be achieved in WoW without erasing or infrequent compression nerfs.

_J_ said...

The difference is that MTG has set win conditions to which every expansion adds new means of attaining.

Yes, they create new win conditions sometimes.

But the general win condition is to lower one's opponent from 20 health to 0 health. It's not that every expansion adds 10 more health to the starting health pool, but rather it modifies that basic structure.

That's different from WoW, wherein every expansion adds more health to the pools, more damage to characters (creatures in MTG).

I realize that's all vague; it's meant to be.

I think what I'd do to avoid the WoW squish situation is that insted of every expansion adding more numbers, keep the numbers vageuely the same but add new mechanics.

So rather than adding new bosses whose health pools are exponentially higher than past bosses, keep bosses in the same general level of health but add new mechanics to new boss fights.

_J_ said...

Here's another way of saying it: I don't like that I can solo Onyxia or Ragnaros; it seems very odd that Ragnaros dies in 4 hits whereas new bosses take so much more damage to kill.

I'd like a game where bosses are constructed relative to one another in a sensible fashion, so Illidan doesn't become a pushover now that I've gained 10 more levels.

Roscoe said...

.... yes, buuuuut... Power and Toughness? Mana Cost-relative-to-Mana Production?

Those don't change between sets anymore than DMG-Per-Sec. changes between expansions.

Sure, different sets change the context in which these conditions apply, but the mechanics don't change their underlying functions... well... every sea-change of Six Sets or so, perhaps.

New expansions don't modify the total health or the ways in which one can damage the other, they modify the quantity of damage done relative to the quantity of damage preventable. Via mana-production/casting speed and counter-measure-ry: counterpart creatures, direct damage, counter, control, whathaveyou.

You would prefer subsequent WoW boss-beasties be roughly the same equivalent stat-wise, but have countermeasures that reduce/intervene the classic ways of increasing stats/grind. Which.. is what I was saying before.. MTG suffers the same problem but gets around it by continually shifting the context. Slowing down production/ diminishing general creature size/adding new wrinkle-rules that warp this set or that.

_J_ said...

"You would prefer subsequent WoW boss-beasties be roughly the same equivalent stat-wise, but have countermeasures that reduce/intervene the classic ways of increasing stats/grind."

Yes. Or, at least, that is what i'm saying in this argument.

I think the problem is the exponential increase in power over time. At T1 40 persons are required to kill Ragnaros. At T2 one warlock in greens can kill Ragnaros.

That seems problematic.

Roscoe said...

Agreed... but.. how do you deal with that, in a progressive system?

Possibly statebased stats that rate characters upon entry to the instance/field/script/what-have-you?

I mean.. they could go back and raise the old guys, Ragnaros etc.., leaving newcomers on the outside of experiencing the content..

They could stomp stats down once in a while, like pushing down the trash in the bin to conserve bags.. pissing off folks because conceptually, you're taking things away from them, albeit for some greater good - See Skullclamp bannings, enraged seniors around Warsaw who hate socialists but will go to arms over losing social security or medicare or whathaveyou.


Or finding some sort of hybrid solution.. and.. an elite-version of the same content with scaled up stats.. seems.. reasonable? Or am I missing a trick?

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