06 Jan 2016 21:37
Laziness on our part...
It's REALLY easy to do things like add values together or take the max of two values (when syncing your stats with the server). It suddenly becomes confusing when we want to take a minimum.
The reason is that we need some initial value to set it to. That value should be infinity, but there is no way to store a representation of infinity in our database. In fact, we have to choose the maximum allowed value of any given number. So then, the question, how do we deal with the very first value? Do we set it to 0 and interpret that as infinity? In that case, what happens if values can actually go to 0, or close enough that they round to zero? What if we set it to the maximum allowed number instead? In that case, we have to KNOW what that maximum value is, so suddenly it's not a generic problem anymore but instead one that has to be dealt with for every individual stat.
I definitely could have found a way to do it, but it would have required more processing and been prone to more weird kinds of errors than I felt comfortable with. So, no minima!