Extra Credits

Power Creep in Hearthstone - What It Teaches Us About Games (2015x37)

: 30, 2015

Since we last talked about power creep on Extra Credits, the phrase has become widely used by many players and yet it is often used incorrectly. Many Hearthstone players responding to the recent "Grand Tournament" expansion have called out the wrong cards as examples: Evil Heckler and Ice Rager are numerically better than cards from the original set (Booty Bay Bodyguard and Magma Rager), but those original cards were so weak that they almost never saw play. The new cards fix that because they meet the game's power curve (the graph of power vs. cost to play) so they're actually playable. But the last set, Goblins vs. Gnomes, contained a card that serves as a perfect example of what power creep actually is: the Piloted Shredder offers such high value relative to other cards of that same cost that it basically becomes the best choice in almost any deck. To respond to that, Blizzard added more cards that have the same cost as the Piloted Shredder, but can kill it without dying themselves. This is true power creep: when one element of a game becomes so strong that the entire game must shift to match it. It effectively deletes the design space for any equally costed card that can't compete with the Piloted Shredder, and if Blizzard can't find a way to reign it back in, then it will eventually force the entire power curve of the game to creep upwards.