I recently saw a post on the official World of Warcraft forums noting that if not for the game’s almost infamous level squish, players would be at level 150 at this point. That in and of itself doesn’t really mean anything, but people did point out that the main reason for the original item squish was the fact that bosses were hitting the absolute limit of how high health could be set, so these numbers needed to be made smaller.
And that statement is… half-true. It is factually true that Garrosh Hellscream had so much health that it was reaching an integer limit and the fight had to reset his health multiple times. But it wasn’t actually mandatory to have player stats be inflated to such a degree that this became necessary. And none of that is actually tied to the levels the game had in place, beyond the fact that it’s all about numbers – what feels significant and what doesn’t.
Let’s talk about numbers.
Numbers show up in basically every MMORPG to measure player progress. It’s easy to look at Ultima Online and say that the game didn’t have levels, but that’s… kind of not true. UO does have a level cap, after a fashion, because elite characters have a stat cap (260 maximum) and a skill cap (720 maximum). It doesn’t display it on a number next to your head, but there is a point at which you can gain no more skill points without lowering others (or wearing skill gear).
The idea of making a maximum level in games is pretty familiar. Dungeons & Dragons classically stops at level 20, for example. Everything has a maximum value, either via hard caps (you literally cannot pass this value) or soft caps (you can pass this value, but it’s going to require such diminishing returns that it’s not going to be realistic). And the point of those maximum values is pretty obviously about making sure that you are forced to have limitations.
This is doubly true in MMORPGs, which have a strong social component. If you could maximize every skill in UO all at the same time, you wouldn’t really have much reason to ever connect with other players (and you would reach a point when other players couldn’t touch you). By forcing you to specialize somewhat, the game doesn’t stop you from making a character who has min-maxed picks, but it does mean that every build has weak points.
You’ll note that none of this really has anything to do with integer values or overflow, and that’s because it… doesn’t need to. Because the thing about numbers is that our brains are actually kind of terrible at numbers, and the mess of numbers that we’re looking at tends to be pretty distracting.
There’s a natural human impulse when it comes to numbers. If a number is good, we want it to be higher. If a number is bad, we want it to be lower. This makes objective and realistic sense. You want your debt lower and your savings higher, for example. The same goes for games. If you have an armor value, you want it to be higher. Health? Higher. Damage dealt? Higher. Cooldowns? Lower.
As a result, it’s really easy to make players feel as if they’re gaining power just by making numbers bigger. If you start with a sword that says it deals 50 DPS, and you get a new sword that deals 200 DPS, you know that it’s a better weapon! You are dealing more damage now! Objectively, the sword is better!
Right?
Well… not necessarily. If you have that first sword in an area where monsters have 2000 health, you will kill those monsters in 40 seconds. But if you get the second sword in an area where monsters have 8000 health… you aren’t actually any stronger. You are dealing more damage, yes, but proportionally it’s the same amount and the sword is functionally just making a number bigger so you feel better about that number.
This is where leveling and increasing numbers gets tricky. It’s easy to make numbers bigger to make you feel as if you’re increasing in power, but without a reference to something else, those bigger numbers might not make much difference. What generally makes an actual difference is access to new abilities, changes to the way you play the game, something that affects the overall gameplay beyond number getting bigger.
But as you may have also ascertained, that can be difficult. Indeed, it can even be difficult to know how much new abilities really matter. Back in Vanilla WoW and for quite some time afterwards, “downranking” was often the smarter way to play, intentionally using a weaker ability that cost less mana in order to fish for random effects that had a much bigger impact. And there was always a question of how much the higher ranks even mattered, especially when other stats have an impact on how much damage your abilities do.
It’s the same thing when it comes to levels. There is nothing that inherently makes leveling to 50 slower or faster than leveling to 100, or 200, or 4,000. Oh, sure, a game can make one or the other easier or harder, but the numbers themselves are just numbers. You can make a game that lets you get 50 levels inside of a two-hour play session; you can make one that takes a solid week of that in order to get one level. What each level offers in terms of power increases is also arbitrary. A level can offer you one extra health or half a million health.
And that half a million health sure looks big the first time, but if everything hits you for about 200,000 damage every single time, the half-million isn’t actually impressive.
Now, my point here is not that there is a one-size-fits-all solution for any of this. City of Heroes is unlikely to add levels now or in the future, especially since the game’s cap has felt rather fixed for more than a decade now. World of Warcraft accepted that players hated only adding five levels with a new expansion in Cataclysm and moved away from that, so it’s another 10 every new expansion. And you can look at this as a natural consequence, that you can’t just keep making the number higher forever before it becomes a problem.
But the thing is that most games don’t need to have a level squish, and a lot of it comes down to how much you’re trying to throw bigger numbers at players in order to make something feel more impactful. Lord of the Rings Online has a level cap of 150, and while that game is not flawless, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of active talk about squishing those levels any time soon. By my admittedly odd definition, UO has a level cap of 720, and that seems to be working out all right at this point.
If you’re about to hit the limit for integers for a 32-bit number, then yeah, you might need to change and rebalance some things. But in order to get there you might be making numbers bigger a bit too fast just so that number equal big. That might be a different problem.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
