On the Issue of Power Creep and How It Relates to Nexon

It's not like he's only preaching wistful, imaginative idealism. The things talked about can be achieved, though, as often stated, he never says it's going to be easy. I think you have a skewed impression of the show in general. You should also definitely take the time to watch the video upon arrival back at your dwelling place.

Just watched the video on power creep; it's more or less what I expected. I agree with the gist of his arguments, but having played every game he talks about except the Zynga one, I don't feel that his examples really make sense.

Power creep in WoW isn't really a case of "force players to keep playing to keep up" as it is a way to keep new content actually meaningful. His example of giving players a stun instead of a blink doesn't make sense in a game with a PvE context.

There's no way to really fall behind in WoW; the level curve is slashed every expansion, you can skip the raid progression that all the long-time players went through, and they consistently nerf older content so that people can run through and experience it without an organized raid group. Plus, the feel of being powerful comes more from your crit, hit, and haste stats than the actual numbers you're putting out. Those get slashed every expansion and players have to rebuild them.

He claims that WoW has attempted to solve the problem of power creep by adding heroic dungeons ... which doesn't make any sense at all. Heroic dungeons are max level dungeons that are part of the process of gearing up for the real (PvE) endgame, which are raids. They are subject to the same power creep that occurs in the raids, in which each tier of heroic dungeons requires higher stats than the last and drops better loot. Unless he means heroic raids, which are a "hard mode" version of the same raids for the more hardcore players. Those don't really have anything to do with power creep, either. They exist concurrently with the normal difficulty raids.

The only real issue with power creep in WoW other than the number inflation is that the old content becomes irrelevant over time. That's actually been addressed with transmogrification; the ability to change the look of your gear to another piece of gear you own.

As far as LoL goes, I thought it was really weird that he was comparing a game that is mostly about PvE to a game that is entirely PvP. The design principles he talks about actually work a lot better here. Also, I don't know if he's played Dota 2 or Team Fortress 2, because they are far better examples of actually making characters unique. A lot of the champions in LoL follow similar skill design patterns.

... Getting distracted so I'll just leave this post here even though it's kind of incomplete and unfocused.