This thread is inspired by another: view original post
"I remember a GDC talk by Blizzard’s Rob Pardo where he outlined a concept any MMO designer should be familiar with. “Always balance up,” he said, talking about both World of Warcraft and Diablo 2 (this was a while ago). If you find something in your game that feels overpowered, that’s good. Players will enjoy it. The solution is never to remove that feeling of power, but to power up other things in the game to meet it. When you weaken your most fun tools, you push everything into a mushy middle. Better to explode everything out into weird and new directions by enabling the players.
So if the problem was that players spent an inordinate amount of time with a few overpowered guns, the solution is to give us more overpowered guns to choose from. Or you can make new enemies and game modes that thwart an exotic gun’s special abilities in interesting ways (read: something besides just having a ton of hitpoints). It is, you could say, a balancing act. But it’s one where it’s a lot harder to mess up by enabling players instead of hobbling them."
Here endeth the lesson.
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Read into "power creep". Hint: it isn't a good thing.