Quote Originally Posted by technole View Post
Yes they are, because belts is a heck lot more than inventory slots. It's a calculation to everyone's stats, in-conjunction with the damage math reset being done in 6.0. This can be rather large, the less math the servers have to keep calculating does free up resources. There is definitely capacity being freed beyond slots, otherwise they would have just been additive in 6.0.
Math is a processing resource, items are a storage resource, these are not the same thing. Using the calculator on your phone does not take up harddrive space. Removing belts has nothing to do with the stat squish, they are separate endeavors. Belts are being removed because we're running out of armory space and they don't seem to have the ability to expand that. So they remove belts and redistribute those slots.

They are doing the stat squish because the numbers are reaching the limits of certain data sizes and going beyond those would require restructuring everything. For example the maximum value of an unsigned 32 bit integer is 4,294,967,295. Anything bigger than that and the number simply will not fit in the available data structure. Stat squishes are performed to keep numbers from ever reaching those critical points.