The Queue: Waterfalls
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.
There's a bunch of good questions in today's Queue: gold cap (including a little extrapolation by yours truly), boss level hit cap design, and voicing of a certain King of Stormwind.
(In my Casey Kasem voice) As for today's reading music, take a listen to the 1990's classic by TLC, Don't Go Chasin' Waterfalls. They totally turn into water elementals too, around 3:40 in the video.
Outdps asked...
"Is the gold cap per character or per account? Is there a gold cap for guild banks?" Bonus question: "What should the gold cap be?"
The limit is 214,748g 36s 48c. That number is magical, in that it's the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer (which are used for just about everything in computers). While the limit was first discovered for characters back in January of last year, it likely is the same for guild banks, however I have no way of verifying it.
In my humbled opinion, Blizzard should recode things (hopefully the process wouldn't be too painful) and set the limit as an octaword. Making the gold limit 17,014,118,346,046,923,173,168,730,371,588,410 57s 28c. That's 17 decillion gold.
Hendrata asked...
"Is there a reason behind hit rating and hit cap mechanism? It feels unnecessary. Why not make raid bosses only +2 in levels?"
The hit cap, the hit mechanics, and the way attack tables work effectively make it so you have to advance in levels in order to kill more difficult mobs in order to obtain greater rewards. Think if as a level 1 you could successfully do 15 damage to a level 80 every time you hit the level 80 - you'd kill the 80 relatively quickly. While this does make some sense from a RP sense in that everyone can kill everyone with a simple knife to the back, it also doesn't lend itself to a playing environment founded in rules and predictable consequences.
Each "boss" level mob is 3 levels above the level cap. That means that Yoggy is a level 83 mob for purposes of attack calculations. The additional three levels can be thought of as a function of the attack (and hit) mechanics: you need to get better gear in order to kill higher level mobs that give you better rewards, and the best way to do that is through necessitating certain statistics on those pieces of better gear, of which hit is of prime importance. Hence you can look at the three levels as a function of hit, rather than hit as a function of the given mob's level (although a case could be made for this).
It's a good philosophical game design question, and one that I'd love to talk to Ghostcrawler about sometime. I imagine Blizzard has explored a lot of different options and selected hit as the best one. Knowing what some of those other options are would lend a lot of depth to the overall discussion.
Racer corrected...
"What is an 'oomkin'? Typo ftw!"
An Oomkin is a Moonkin Druid. He's an Oomkin because he's Out Of Mana a lot. It's an old school reference, although I thought more people would get it...
Aeire tweeted me last night...
"How come Varian over in Stormwind Keep doesn't have a custom voice?"
There's probably a few reasons. First, there's probably no real compelling reason to yet. Varian in Stormwind isn't a very active character. Only a few quests lead to him, and while he's really active in the battle for the Undercity, it doesn't take place in Stormwind. So no reason to add custom voices there.
I'm sure the WoW devs have thought about adding in custom voices for all the NPCs, but I'm strongly against such an idea and I'm sure there are a few people at Blizzard who are against it too. Including all those voices will add several gigabytes to an already large game.
But with that said... hopefully some of these key characters like Varian can be voiced in the future.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!
