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I'm Winn Liu. Power creep is one of the most annoying things to deal with as a player and a developer.

For those unaware, power creep is when new content is so overpowered that it makes older content useless and obsolete. Things like newer weapons, armour or spells that are exactly the same as older ones except having ten more hit points and being five per cent more resistant to poison damage. This means that players have no reason to pick the older equipment at all.

Now why is addressing power creep important? The reason is that I am noticing more and more games intentionally adding power creep to games encouraging players to more money for less frustrating gameplay.

Power creep will always be a thing in any perpetual game because of the new influx of content. However, there are some things that can further speed up the power creep process.

One of those things would be a lack of diversity when making cards, weapons or spells, You may be wondering why making equipment similar would cause power creep. The reason is that having two similar cards would cause the card with better stats to be picked every time.

Think of Gacha games where each update brings newer characters with the same ability as older characters except that he can also heal his teammates on top of that.

This often happens when game developers are behind schedule or short on budget.

Planning out and playtesting your weapon, cards, or skills is one of the most important things you should be doing to prevent power creep. The more you plan and playtest, the more your game will be balanced and is less likely to power creep.

Something you should always keep in the back of your mind is whether the thing you're implementing can be used in place of an already existing item. If it can, the older item will most definitely get power crept.

I find this the most concerning as if marketing is allowed to control power creep, our game experience will get worse as a result.

Often games like to artificially induce power creep. Think of mobile clicker games that require you to purchase things to get a new item that helps you get ten times more items per click or other games that require you to pay for gems to speed up things that would otherwise take hours or days to complete.

If power creep is left unchecked, people will start to feel that your development team does not care for the game and only wants money. Here are some things I tend to notice when people complain about power creep.

Unfortunately, power creep is something that will always be in any perpetual game, but we can always do things to limit it from growing.

This means to take two systems that cannot be compared. Like comparing apples and oranges. Take this for an example, a healing spell and damage amplifying spell. Those two spells cannot be compared as they do fundamentally different jobs, thus you are less likely to have one spell to power creep the other.

It is important to take feedback from players as they are the ones actually playing and experiencing your game.

Of course, you do not want to take every single word to heart as most people use their emotions to give feedback and unfortunately, some of those solutions are just plain terrible. But, it is important to not ignore those feedback as well for you may just find one or more excellent solutions to your problem.

Once you figure out the issues, do balancing updates. Now, it is guaranteed that there will be people who are against the changes, but as long as you make sure that there is an overall positive reception from your updates, then you have done your job.

Power Creep is something that every game developer has to deal with but with enough planning ahead of time by creating skills that are not based on numbers and based on functionality instead, I'm sure that you will be able to minimise and keep power creep under control.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions to do with game development. Thank you for reading today’s blog post!