#53 - July 26, 2012, 12:45 p.m.
Guys, you're missing my point. It isn't about actual time played to get to cap, It's more about the perception of ""How Many??"".
As we know, it's been stated by Blizz that certain numbers in the game are getting a little out of hand.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3258652
I think you have a good point, perceptions are a very tricky subject to deal with.
Still, I think it’s important to understand where perceptions come from. I think this one in particular is very dependent on what players are accustomed to with the MMORPG genre. This is really important because WoW has been, in my opinion, constantly setting and raising the standards of what players should expect of a MMORPG game.
Where I’m getting at is, this is all relative, if Vanilla had a level cap other than 60, let’s say 200, we could easily be discussing how increasing it to a number like 300 in MoP could be causing a weird perception of being “too high” of a value.
I think we’re quite safe. For me, the most important thing is that we keep the proportional relation between “time spent levelling” and the increase in the level cap with each expansion somewhat consistent.
With BC and WoTLK we increased the level cap by 10, so in WoTLK players already knew what to expect, but in Cataclysm it was only 5 levels, and that’s where perceptions can get a little weird because players could think “hey it’s going to take half the time”, which isn’t really true, as we can adjust many other variables like xp gained per mob/quest/dungeon and the amount of xp required per level.
I think players have roughly a good idea of what to expect with the levelling pace in MoP and hopefully if anything surprises them on that regard it will only be for the best.
Regarding the issue that you mentioned with the “Item Squish”, there are two things at stake there, one is perception, if values increase exponentially they will eventually look weird and hard to read.
But most importantly it was and still is, a matter of hardware. A lot of players still use 32-bit computers, or at least have a 32-bit OS even if they might have a 64bit CPU.
I won’t get into much detail here but from what I can remember of my microprogramming days it has to do with the amount of bits a CPU can process per cycle. Since all variables are eventually converted to a binary number at the lowest level, when you get a big enough decimal number, let’s say 2,147,483,647 we’ve just hit the limit of 32-bits for a signed number. So imagine you have a boss with a HP higher than that value, or you have a damage meter addon that is constantly adding up all the damage your raid is doing, once those values surpass that decimal number your 32-bit CPU will need 2 cycles instead of 1 to do the same calculation, thus reducing the overall performance of the game.
So unless we get everyone to use 64-bit CPUs/OSes, there’s really no way around it, it will have to be dealt with somehow, whether it’s by doing an item squish or something else, only time and our dear developers will know.
For MoP, you don’t have to worry about it,
there won’t be any item squish.
