Powercreep

Every game I play that gets constant updates suffers from powercreep. Even strategy games suffer from these problems. Every card game suffers with each new card drop. Every MMO suffers, every life service game suffers. Every manga that goes on for too long suffers.

This brings the questions? Is powercreep is a cursed design problem? How can it be solved?

The Problem With Powercreep

The real problem with powercreep is the danger of older content growing into irrelevance. In card games this often results in older cards becoming worthless because newer cards are simply always a better choice.

In Yu-Gi-Oh you see it when looking at the text for old cards and the text of modern ones. Before, even lore text could be printed, now instead 6 new abilities are printed so small that you need a magnifying glass.

A Possible Solution

We mostly want to avoid making old content obsolete. As developers we want to spend our time efficiently. So want our players.

We need to keep in mind two aspects. Input and output. Does one option take less input for more or the same output? Then we created a type of powercreep. We made one option obsolete because there exists a better option.

In card games this often shows when a card costs little but has a big value. Often cards with the same cost are now compared to this. If the player now only chooses the better card all other cards come closer to an obsolete territory.

We need to constantly balance and keep in mind this aspect of input and output.

The Worst Case

The worst case of powercreep is achieved when the options have all such high output that the game become hard to get into. Before cards had only 4 to 8 mechanics. Now there are over 80-150 to learn. Not only will the quanitity of these outputs increase but their overall effect too.