Update's Up! (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, March 30, 2015, 02:11 (3315 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by General Vagueness, Monday, March 30, 2015, 02:29

That might not be it though. It could just be that the bars are all too often not correct, and can even go down when they should go up, or vice versa, and using numbers instead would make it easier to confirm that.

We've been over this. The bar already represents a number, AKA how full the bar is.

Yes, it does. You know what represents a number better? A number. An honest-to-goodness Hindu-Arabic digit sequence. Heck, I'd take Roman numerals or hexadecimal.

No bar is 0, full bar is 100. Displaying a number would be less useful, since the bars offer a quick way to compare.

I never said they shouldn't have the bars, I just said I want numbers. It's completely trivial to have both, you don't even need extra space, just put the number next to or inside the bar.
The bars do give a quick way to compare, but many people are like me and are not good at eyeballing differences in length. That's why they let you pull the right trigger to see an overlay. That's not incompatible with showing numbers either.

As far wanting to know the absolute number, that is meaningless since so much affects your damage.

I don't even know what you're saying here. I want to see the numbers for all of the "so much" that affects my damage-- that would help me to put them into perspective.

The numbers only make sense when compared to another weapon - This scout rifle has more impact but less stability than this other one. This is what the bar does anyway.

Yeah, but it's not precise-- or at least, it's hard to get precision from it. It's been shown different stats vary in different ways based on what you see. Generally a small visible change gives a small change in effect, and a large one gives a large change, but that's not universal, and different people have different ideas of what's small or large on the bars and what's a small or large effect.
On top of that, this might be on my TV or my setup, or just the fact I'm using an old standard analog TV or an older-generation console, but it can be hard to even see what the bars are communicating, even with the right trigger comparison. It can be hard to tell if there is a difference, and which thing is larger, and if it's the difference is a tiny sliver or a minuscule smidgen.

Look at the bar for a sniper rifle. Not very full is it? Well, the sniper certainly does more damage than a hand cannon, whose bar is large. That bar is only meaningful when looking between sniper rifles.

I don't see the relevance, I'm not asking for a comparison between different classes of guns-- and if I was, it would still be warranted, because the right trigger comparison feature takes no account of that, and gleefully tells you a sniper has half the impact of an auto rifle when that's clearly not the case. Understanding you should mostly only compare values between the same type of gun is something I already have, and it's already a prerequisite for using the comparison feature properly.

If you want a number, look up the gun on DestinyDB. It lists the exact numerical value, which has zero practical value over the bar.

I don't want to have to go to a website though.
The practical value is in how much. How much better or worse is gun A than gun B in these specific areas? That is the perfect time to use numbers, questions of how much are the reason numbers even exist.
None of that addresses the part you quoted anyway, which is that on top of not being precise, the bars are often not accurate either. This is relatively easy to miss with bars but more evident with numbers, because you can be sure a number didn't change or actually went down instead of up. I was being cynical, thinking maybe that was a reason, they don't want us to see their errors, but whether it is or not, now I think having numbers would be good because it'll give them immediate and plentiful feedback about which perks aren't depicted or described properly-- showing us the numbers could help us to help them make the information more accurate and consistent.