A common issue with ongoing live service games is that as time progresses, skill designs for new characters necessarily become more complex to differentiate from older characters or to incentivize players to buy them. This sometimes results in things like Fire Emblem Heroes where character skill sheets become page long monstrosities. What are things you can do to maintain the increased complexity without making it seem like a reading assignment?

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In times like this, it's good to look back at other long-running games that still run today and how they solved (or at least pushed back on) complexity and power creep.

Magic: The Gathering has been the most popular collectible card game in the world for over three decades. In that time, the publishers have created many tens of thousands of different cards. As such, deck building complexity is potentially off the charts. However, Wizards of the Coast figured out early that keeping multiple game formats, and pushing their main format (standard) as a rotating format. This means that their standard decks are only legal if they are comprised of cards from the latest sets, rather than any card printed since 1993. This rotating format system proved extremely effective at maintaining a consistent power and complexity level for most players - so much so that other collectible card games have adopted a similar approach. Cards above rate on the power or complexity curve can still have their time in the spotlight, and then rotate out such that most players no longer have to deal with them.

World of Warcraft had a similar issue where power and complexity was building at an exponential rate with each expansion pack because every expansion needed to invalidate raid gear from the previous status quo in order to entice players to keep playing. However, since WOW must continue to support all content they've ever released forever, doing some kind of content rotation was not in the cards. Instead, World of Warcraft would introduce the concept of the "stat squish" where power and complexity curves would be flattened - a sort of global scaling down of power to keep the complexity and power of new content from getting too ridiculous. Since old content was, for the most part, only there for achievements and cosmetics and not for actual character progression, the amount of power those old items needed could be squished down with minimal player complaints.

These are two successful methods other long-running games have used to solve their complexity and power creep issues. These are obviously not the only ways to handle this - there is a pretty wide open design space to address this issue. I suspect that FEH will likely eventually need to take some steps to address the complexity and power creep, given the massive power differences between the release units and the current versions. What might some alternative options be for reducing power and complexity for legacy content?

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