(LL Discussion) Physical and Magical not distinguishable? UI can't implement it? Why?

[linayar]

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

Q: I think it’d be convenient if the flying text for damage dealt by enemy attacks could indicate whether the damage is physical or magical, are there any plans for something like that in the future? It’d affect content difficulty, so I understand that it may be difficult to do so...

A: If we’re strictly speaking about whether it’d be possible or not, it’s possible. However, the data relayed to the damage displaying UI doesn’t contain an indication of whether the damage is physical or magical. Implementing this feature would likely make the packets of data larger, so it’s hard for the UI team to determine whether it’d be possible or not.

Yoshida: Even if the packet sizes were increased, it would still be considered possible from a technical standpoint. However, there are other reasons why this sort of feature hasn’t been implemented. For high difficulty content, we’re constantly making balance adjustments up till patch release, and one aspect of that is determining whether each enemy attack will deal physical or magical damage. From time to time, we’ve had cases where a method that allowed you to ignore mechanics was discovered right before the deadline for patch release.

This is sometimes resolved by changing physical damage to magical and vice-versa, and reflecting this sort of change in the flying text would require another several days of QA testing. This would in turn affect the patch schedule, so we’ve intentionally refrained from implementing such a feature in favor of securing a more stable schedule for patch releases.

[Recon1o6]

Not sure if it's any clearer, but from the digest:

In other words: We think we could, but we haven't tried and don't have any intention at this time despite players asking for years

I really don't see what's hard about "If X is 1- output text as blue ELSE- output text as red" on the client side settings where X being 1 is magical and 0 (the value returned by ELSE) is physical and the option to disable the setting with it disabled being default if they are worried about server strain.

Ok, so maybe there's non magical, non physical damage which would explain why certain programs are thrown for a loop, but you get the idea.

yoshi-p's statement there really isn't a justifiable reason, the display of attack types would make it easier on the QA team to find these fixes, it would still output the same amount of data in practice (either a 1 or a 0)