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When the big squish happens, you'll still be able to kill the mobs
We've been hearing about this for years in one way or another -- WoW's numbers are simply getting too large. The final solution to this is to squish all the item levels from all the previous content together to form a more compact progression. Ghostcrawler and other designers have been saying for a while now that this is coming up in the next expansion, so it shouldn't be a shock to anyone. One of the key things to remember is what Ghostcrawler tweeted today: @Drazzildab Exactly. If it takes you 6 seconds to kill a level 90 mob, it still will post squish. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) September 18, 2013 While the numbers will change, the percentage of damage and rate of death reigning down form on high will not change. This is a central tenant of the system -- post-squish, players must be able to run content in the same way as they are now, just with smaller numbers flashing across the screen. Blizzard will be able to accomplish this by running a series of relatively complex algorithms to decrease all the numbers from each expansion/major tier. And while performing the squish on a large scale like WoW is complicated, the squish on a small scale is easy to understand -- everything is decreased by some percent. There are areas in earlier content where the squish could negatively impact lower level character's ability to run previous expansion content -- ie, a level 70 mage might find it more difficult to run level 60 dungeons. But as Ghostcrawler correctly notes, the change of power in the squish is most important to preserve at the latest tier of content. However you look at it -- just remember and remind people that the squish will not stop solo content.
Item Squish extremely likely for WoW's next expansion
Gamescom is drawing to a close, and with it a flurry of developer interviews have been taking place. One which happened just a couple of hours ago was a raiding-specific round table with Game Director Tom Chilton and Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton. One of the questions asked related to the much-debated item squish, and whether we would see it in WoW 6.0. Tom and Cory responded as follows: TC: "If we don't do the item squish it's going to require a lot of re-engineering of our combat code to actually support bigger numbers. We're getting really close to the point where the code can't..." CS: "Yeah, the code can't compile the numbers" TC: "Yeah it can't compile the numbers, so we are testing the item squish internally with the expansion, and I think a good time to launch it would be right before the next expansion so people are already used to it by the time the expansion launches. So, that's the current plan, but we'll see how it works out. I hope we can." Of course that isn't a firm confirmation, there have been many changes, certainly ones of this magnitude, that have gone into internal testing and not ever made it live. This is no cast iron guarantee. But, the devs mention how their combat code is nearing the point where it can't actually handle the big numbers, and it seems that a full expansion of item level escalation would do nothing to help with this issue. So an item squish certainly seems extremely likely for the next expansion.
Origami fix for squishy MacBook trackpads
It seems that a good many MacBook owners are having issues with their trackpads. Instead of the usual crisp "click" that we have all come to know and love from our Apple portables, they are instead greeted by a laggardly squish. These are not the first Apple notebooks to have trackpad issues; my rev D PowerBook has a trackpad button that is so stiff and noisy it can be heard across the room, but that's beside the point. As is par for the course with most of these issues that only seem to show up in a few machines, Apple is refusing to do anything about the squishy trackpads. Fortunately for those plagued with the issue, an enterprising paper-folding power user found that sticking some folded up paper between the battery and the trackpad fixes the issue. Via Slashdot.
