Billions is a drama on Showtime that follows two amazing actor being frat boys all grown up. I watch it for the acting, not the inane, basically pointless plotlines. You see the plot is there just so Giamatti can launch some spittle and Lewis can intimidate people with his height. Being a video game blog, this Sunday night show featuring bro on bro acting isn’t why we are here. No, we’re here because I’ve no idea why I’m receiving literally billions of Artifact Power. We’re stat squishing in Battle for Azeroth, thank C’thun, but this is ridiculousness!
I get it. The design team on World of Warcraft has let the numbers expand since the game launched in 2004, when a few thousand health was considered a top geared toon. Now six figures of damage is routine. That’s a legacy system that has evolved, read ballooned like terrible IT debt, over time. Artifact Power, and the associated Artifact Knowledge, are new. There’s no reason they needed to follow this absurd trend. Furthermore, they don’t until you pop level 110. Previous to that glorious chime going off you’re happy with 30-150 Artifact Power coming your way in routine doses. Then BAM, you do the 1 billion double take. Convinced it’s a typo or some weird patch bug or Battle for Azeroth catch up mechanic you head to the internet. And find out this need for billions has always been the case!
Is there any reasonable explanation for this? Are we simply stuck in the pinball trap of inflating scores to draw quarters from the next machine over? Do we have a demonic possession of systems design? Perhaps this is an employee’s attempt to enter the three commas club? Or a vein obfuscation to hide the fact that we couldn’t replace the standard bag for over a decade because of an early hardcoded value? What’s your favorite conspiracy theory for thousands of billions of Artifact Power being necessary?
We’ve room for 999,999,995 more.