The Fundamental Issue with Power Creep

General Discussion
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I remember raising concerns of power creep 2 years ago during one of the ‘Ask The Developers’. Their response was simple - power creep is here to stay and is part and parcel of their game design. I was very worried with this response, having seen other game developers make that same mistake. To give an example, Magic: The Gathering made this mistake and lost a significant % of their player base during the infamous Urza Summer and subsequently Mirrodin Affinity. But less talk about Magic and more about E&P.

The Problem
Power creep has an upper ceiling of limitation from a design perspective before you run out of ideas and/or it becomes ridiculous. Say you design a hero. Let’s call him Chuck Norris for humour purposes. His special is average speed and when he fires it reads ‘Kill All Opposing Heroes’. Super OP indeed. Now where do you go from there when designing the next hero? You could make Chuck Norris 2 Fast speed. You could then make Chuck Norris 3 Very Fast Speed… you catch my drift here. But soon there is no design space to further tap into and every single hero you release after is going to be inferior.

And unfortunately this is what we are starting to see in this game.
You see healers heal for increasingly larger amounts of health. Compare Grazul to Garnet to Hathor. Compare Vivica to Prof Lidenbrock to Cleopatra to Costume Lidenbrock.
You see damage dealers do increasingly larger amounts of damage. Compare Quintus to Killhare to Costume Panther.
You see tank heroes do more work. Compare Ares to Telluria to M&M (pre-nerf).

You get my drift. The gameplay mechanics are tapped out. There is no longer any design space. Most new heroes (and they release them by the bucket load) are underwhelming or uninteresting. Or they could release even more OP heroes and break the game even further resulting in further nerfs.

We have gotten to a stage of the game where there have been more and more broken mechanics being released - Superior Talent, LB2 Aether Power - with inadequate testing which are unbalanced or simply unfun. I laughed when the developers mentioned how Superior Talent ‘enriches’ the gameplay experience. Maybe we should do a straw poll and ask the player base how FUN the game is every time c2Obakan or c2Vivica revives and gains 50% mana. Or how FUN it is when their c2Magni provides dodge to his allies causing your specials to miss. Or how FUN it is to fight a Ludwig with 4 turns of taunt in Rush war.

But you can issue balance patches Right?
Sure you can. This is not Starcraft where everyone has all the heroes available and Blizzard can adjust the heroes as they see fit to balance the game. In this slot machine game, people spend real world money with the hope of gaining their heroes. Whether it is the cheap deals at $2.99 or the mega deals at $100. Some times people spends hundreds… thousands with the hope of pulling a specific hero. Nerfing a hero no matter how big or small the adjustment will make people angry. Fundamentally changing the hero… well let’s not get there.
Let’s go back to Chuck Norris. Average Speed. When he fires his special he kills all heroes. Completely overpowered of course. Now after 2 weeks, the developers finally realise he is completely broken and decide to her him. Chuck Norris v.2. Slow Speed. Does 50% damage to 3 heroes. How many of you would be happy with the changes?

But yet there are fundamental changes to heroes (whether they are over powered or not) that will significantly alter their usefulness and viability. Fortuna, Gazelle, Milena… the list goes on.

It is very clear what the problems are at the moment:

  • Lazy and rushed design leading to increasing levels of power creep and unbalanced gameplay
  • Developers struggling to design heroes which would entice people to spend their money to obtain
  • The need for wholesale adjustments to make future projects (aka new heroes) more enticing

So before you spend another cent on this game, ask yourself this question - Are the developers doing a good job in making this game a fulfilling experience or are you just spending in the hope that the developers will eventually get things right again?

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Well said waffle!

I 100% agree with all you said. Time to stop spending for real this time. Retirement is closer than ever now.

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As I remember, in the same AMA the devs also said that they are trying to come up with new mechanics instead of only releasing stronger versions of already existing heroes. And to be fair, they did both.

But now they claim to adress pretty much the exact problem you describe with the big balance update. But I don’t buy it. At least one of multiple things they are doing here, is widening the gap between epic ans legendary after they realized many people are happy to pull 2c caedmon for example as a budget version of el naddaha. Otherwise we would see more epic and rare heroes in that “balance update” as well.

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Let me add this , Im very frustrated from the game it’s not improving , become iterative with seasonal events & contests , no good rewards , when they design W3k it become just regular war with 12 flags you can’t courage team members to use all , not to mention ppl have real life ( work - sleep - family gathering - visits - short time game) the way they design giving war flags, MT flags, & Monster flags like we have all day to play it’s very annoying.

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I 100% agree with this! Why change (or completely remove) heroes core ability and make them completely useless when tackling the power creep problem? Keep Fortunas dispell and Milena/Gazelles amount of heal and the same for other heroes core abilities!

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Power creep is only a problem from the player’s perspective. They need it to maintain the game. Without it, you “buy in” and then play the game indefinitely for free. That model works too, but not in a play-for-free (wink wink) environment. They have to keep you spending. Somehow. Powercreep is an easy way to do it.

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There will be new problem with power creep very soon. SG said that they almost reached upper limit of speciall skill % so its time to use stats as power creep.

Newest 4* are already almost as strong as old 5* and they often have better abilities. While it doesn’t matter for healers it will make hitters even worse than now.
Higher attack stats will make them hit as strong as with higher % special skills and they will be much harder to kill because of higher defense and health stats.

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Appreciate your effort to wrote that topic but what is the benift from all that if no one listen to you , and my main questions whay they named that community forum ? I am 1000% sure that none of them even open this page or even read the headlines, anywy thatks for sharing

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No. No they are not. It is no longer fulfilling. Thank you for the enlightenment

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The power creep is already too big thinking about events and map stages. Players who do not spend, can hardly finish and the players who spend a lot, can autofarm. They had to revise several events recently after releasing them because of this.

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A large part of the problem here is that the developers have been lazy. There are so many ways to monetize games, and some of them, particularly those that would offer new content or experiences would likely be embraced by the community. Instead, SG decided that their business would be nearly 100% based on selling heroes. The issues we are seeing now have been predicted for some time. SG could have avoided this, but they chose not to.

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It’s evolution. When they start the limit breaker it was obvious that they will go till level 100 lb4. It’s all designed from the begining. Now season 1 heroes with 2costumes 4* and 5* are much stronger for balance purposes. The biggest frustration comes if you pay money for this game. Seeing your top heroes getting nerfed, but when you pay you take that risk. If you are a free to play you don’t have those issues you just play and whatever comes. The only frustration for a f2p is when they don’t get a 5* they want, but the odds are the same for everyone. So better enjoy what the game gives us rather being frustrated cause like it or not fairly or unfairly this is how the game runs.

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What about the frustration for the f2p when they get lucky with a summon and land a great hero then gets nerfed?!?! Takes them far longer to max said great hero and by the time they do they are at risk of barely using it before it gets nerfed. I feel far more for those guys than those of us who spend.

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A large part of the problem is the whales that keep spending.
The big balance update is a joke! They aren’t balancing anything, all they are doing is widening the gap, giving newer heroes buffs and older heroes nerfs I.e. Milena i along with alot of other ppl traded away 20 for her in SE only for them to nerf her for no good reason, she was not breaking the game.
If they really wanted to balance things they would take a look at the top 100 rosters and synergies
I don’t see a Milena albeit she is better on offence hippo got a buff yet an old hero like Milena gets nerfed. Total BS
Do you ever ask yourself how do top players get the newest heroes almost the very same day they come out, fully maxed limit broken and already in their roster, cause they spend like crazy for something not tangible maybe these :whale: have more :moneybag:then they can spend.
It’s the :whale: that keep spending like crazy to satisfy their own ego that is ruining empires and puzzles, that why the developers can do anything they want and are not held accountable.
If players hit them where it counts and stop spending maybe maybe the developers would not be so arrogant and stupid

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This 1000%. It’s always come down to, “How do we get the whales to spend???” The other thing related to this, you can’t tell people how to spend their hard earned money and they bring in around 90% of the revenue but they’re the reason this beast has gotten out of control.
The bigger slap in the face is the solution SnG has proposed unfortunately.

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I said something similar just not as eloquently, glad to see my thinking is not altogether off balance. Thank you

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Perfectly stated my friend.

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There’s a song in my head…
43befcb6-69b3-4319-a1b2-e662920be2ca_text

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I have often viewed SG’s execution as lazy. But am now of the belief that all of these moves are intentional. Coincidence take a whole heap of planning. It’s outright theft.

I am to the point where I don’t know where to allocate resources other than titan and event heroes. Except that eventing sucks. So then it’s just mystic titan heroes. So every other month I can have fun for maybe half of my flags that don’t have the weak spot on the side. Yay!

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Waffle for President

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