http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnstableEquilibrium

Murphy's Law: John's Collateral Corollary "In order to get a loan you must first prove you don't need it."

A design pattern common in many games, an Unstable Equilibrium occurs when there is a design feature in a game that rewards a well-performing player with multiple advantages that help them in later parts of the game. Because of this pile-up of advantages, the player who is winning now is a lot more likely to win later. It also means that the player who has developed more skill is more likely to win in general. Getting the trope right—the number of advantages, the pileup rate, things like that—is a very difficult design problem, and endless fodder for Fan Wank.

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In a single-player game, this can create a situation where early advantages accumulate to the point where the game becomes very easy later on, while early mistakes make it harder and harder to recover; this can make the game boring for more skilled players and frustrating enough to drive away everyone else.

In multiplayer games, it's more complicated; if it places too much weight on initial decisions, it can lead to games being decided very early on, reducing what happens afterwards to relatively boring mopping-up. But it can be important in multiplayer games that have become Serious Business—chess being the classic example. A good chess player will rarely make a big-enough "blunder" to give the opponent immediate victory, so it's necessary for small advantages to accumulate in the long term. Depending on the implementation this trope can also, paradoxically, reduce the frustration of a protracted loss, since it will Mercy Kill you quickly if you make a mistake as the progressive pile-up of advantages ends the game.

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Often referred to as "snowballing", as the player's growing power becomes reminiscent of a snowball that constantly grows larger as it rolls down a snow-covered hill. (Both the Human Snowball and Snowball Lie tropes also refer to this.) This article provides a more in-depth examination of the issues surrounding the phenomenon, and also provides some ways to avoid it.

This can occur in several ways, including the following:

See Bragging Rights Reward and Multiple Endings, which are both alternatives to giving more power to skilled players. Related to Resources Management Gameplay. Continuing is Painful is a frequent contributor to this, since losing tosses even more disadvantages at you. Closely related to Early Game Hell. Contrast Rubber-Band A.I. and Comeback Mechanic. See Golden Snitch for one major type of aversion. Opposite to Dynamic Difficulty. Almost opposite to Empty Levels, in which the overall difficulty of the game increases as your character gains levels. See also Hard Mode Perks, which is rewarding the player for simply choosing a higher difficulty.

Can be Truth in Television: For instance, those who make more money have more financial resources to draw on, which makes it significantly easier to increase income in the future.

Video Game Examples:

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Action Game

Beat Em Up

God Hand includes a difficulty system that goes from easier to harder and back depending on how well the player's doing, through levels 1, 2, 3 and the aptly named Die. After each stage, the game counts up all the enemies you killed on each level and rewards you with money, with kills on higher levels being worth more, and conversely penalizes you for every death. Having more money allows players to buy upgrades and more powerful attacks.

In Tonight We Riot, the player's party is stronger the more workers they have liberated for the revolution. Lose some workers early in a level, and it is likely to turn into an uphill struggle throughout. Conversely, assembling a big enough pack can turn most levels to a walk in the park.

Fighting Game

Doomsday Warrior gives you experience based on how much health you have at the end of each fight. You get one point for every remaining life segment to spend on stats. If you struggle against opponents and barely win, you will end up weaker. If you regularly win with more than 75% of your health, you will end up stronger.

Human Killing Machine has a very annoying mechanic where Kwon, the player character, is designated either "strong" or "weak" at the beginning of a fight, depending on how well he beat his previous opponent. If he won the fight with high health, he is "strong" and needs fewer knockdowns to defeat his next opponent - but if he barely won he is "weak" and requires more knockdowns to win. While the intention was presumably to reward a player who was on a good streak, the reality is that it is difficult enough to beat an opponent at all with the game's poor controls and hit detection. Therefore, most victories the player will achieve will be barely scraping by, ensuring that Kwon remains "weak", and since each opponent essentially gains an extra two lifebars under those circumstances, the chances of clawing one's way back up to making Kwon "strong" again are essentially nil.

First Person Shooter

Counter-Strike: Online multiplayer team games such as CounterStrike often gives the winning team a bigger reward. This, of course, means that as one side keeps winning, the losing team slowly becomes crippled relative to the winning side. Which is why some servers have House Rules such as a side that has lost a certain times in a row may suddenly receive a mysterious cash infusion so that they can afford the same weapons as the winning side. Some servers also run a Warcraft mod where players earn XP for kills. Higher levels get better abilities, which may make it nigh-impossible for low-level players to get any kills. For example, an Orc player at a certain level has the explosive power and range of regular frag grenades boosted by a factor of 2-4. This can allow an Orc to clear out an entire building with a single grenade. While some servers keep your XP and level if you log out and come back later, other servers reset it either upon a login or at certain intervals.

A similar problem occurs in multiplayer games where the players have to collect weapons and powerups like Quake and Unreal Tournament. A recently killed player will be severely understocked against the player that just killed him, which in turn leads to worse chances of getting the next powerup that appears and increased chances of dying again. In Unreal Tournament 2004's case, the adrenaline. By getting full adrenaline the player can temporarily give himself regeneration, a faster firing rate, superspeed movement or even invisibility. A good player will gain a massive advantage from these with the most unfortunate example being Bombing Run, a sports-esque game mode where scoring a goal gives a large amount of adrenaline to the player, about 35% of the meter. Since speed is very important in Bombing Run, the winning team will be able to abuse the superspeed powerup over and over again as they score more goals and refill the adrenaline almost instantly. Notably, Adrenaline is disabled in most competitive UT2004 matches, as are the one-shot-kill superweapons. This means that in competition, the unstable equilibrium feature on a map is usually the large shield pickup. It's a strong enough bonus to ensure that its holder cannot be killed in one shot by any normal means (though falling into an instant-kill map hazard is still fatal). This item spawns on a predictable timer, and many, MANY matches are decided largely on which player can manage to be precisely at the point where the pack spawns at precisely the moment the shield respawns. The player who took the last shield has a ridiculous advantage in taking the next shield, provided that they manage to retain their shielding. Additionally, as the player's arsenal is emptied on death, the shield-holder often has a wider array of weapons available in any given encounter, where a freshly-spawned player might have two or even one good weapon. Also, given that certain (usually deathmatch) rulesets make weapon pickups despawn temporarily on pickup, a player with the early lead can conceivably hold a monopoly on the best health items on the map AND the best weapons for depleting that health. It's little wonder that very small skill gaps in UT2004 can lead to landslide victories. In the Onslaught game mode, Power Nodes almost always spawn vehicles. The team controlling the most nodes thus usually has a firepower advantage, which in turn makes it harder and harder for the other team to either construct a contested node or keep it up long enough that they can move on to the next one.

Team Fortress 2 The game, as carefully balanced as it is, does this on purpose. On control point maps, a team that's down to a single point still under its control will have its respawn interval increased, making it take longer for a killed defender to rejoin the fight: without this rule, the density of defenders on the last point would be so high that no one would ever win. The game also rewards doing well with critical hits: If you've done a lot of damage in the last twenty seconds, one has a much higher chance of scoring critical hits and, therefore, to keep killing. This is to encourage players who are 'on a roll' to stay that way. In Capture the Flag, capturing the intelligence (flag) awards your whole team several seconds of all crits, making is easier to push for the intelligence again. Likewise, in Arena mode, whoever earns the first kill earns several seconds of critical hits (not shared with your team this time), making it easier to keep killing (otherwise, earning the first kill would be nearly suicidal). They go into great detail on the evils of stalemates in the dev commentary. The engineer's teleporter, the moving respawns, and the sliding respawn interval are all bent towards crushing the weaker team, so the match can end and the teams can be reshuffled. It's also interesting to play third-party maps by people who didn't listen to the commentary, and therefore designed a old-style static map, which of course results in a stalemate nine times out of ten. This also becomes a problem on servers with instant respawn—while it's nice to get back into the fight more quickly, it pretty much destroys game balance. In Mann Vs Machine, a well-comprised and well-organized team is more likely to be able to get a lot of the money dropped by robots when they die. The team needs the money to upgrade their equipment, which is necessary for surviving later waves of robots. Likewise, the robots become stronger the longer they can hold the bomb without dropping it, making easier to keep from dropping it.

The Developer Infinity Ward: The Modern Warfare series and Call of Duty: World at War also have this - players who get kill streaks without dying are rewarded with air support raining down on the opposition. However, these advantages are SO high as to fall squarely into the main-level trope. Someone who is only okay is likely to get less and less kills, as the high-level people gain the ability to use those tricks. This goes even further in Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, as the later killstreak rewards are often simply -better- than earlier ones. A weaker team might be trying its hardest to scrape together enough kills to earn a UAV recon or spy plane, whereas the other team can be grinding them into dust with repeated airstrikes, AC130 gunships and attack helicopters. Worse, in Modern Warfare 2, said killstreak rewards count towards earning others, something that resulted in the somewhat infamous Harrier/Chopper Gunner/Nuke combo. * Getting a Harrier (7 kills) usually gets enough kills for a Chopper Gunner/AC130 (11 kills) which leads up to a Tactical Nuke (25 kills). Needless to say, this is horrifying for the other team. Reasons like this are why Modern Warfare 3 tones down the killstreaks substantially; many killstreaks require more kills than in the previous game, air support only counts toward your killstreak if used during the same killstreak it was obtained in, and there are better counter-air-support options, such as better rocket launchers and a surface-air missile turret item. Additionally, the new version of the Tactical Nuke, the M.O.A.B. (Mother of All Bombs), is less powerful and much harder to get—it instantly kills the entire enemy team rather than instantly ending the game, and the requisite 25-kill streak no longer counts kills gotten using other killstreaks. Curiously this can also manifest within a team. If one or two exceptional players keep killing the outmatched enemy team, their allies can find themselves constantly chasing after blips on the radar, finding only corpses, while their exceptional allies are already on the other side of the map making new corpses of the team who have just respawned. As the best players get better and better killstreak rewards they'll create a situation where only they can get kills, because the enemies spend too much time dead for anyone else to have a chance.

In the online FPS Planetside, players were soldiers on a battlefield and received experience points for killing enemies, but received much more experience points if their side won a battle. Hence, if one side started losing, players on that side would realize they were unlikely to win and pull out, looking for better experience-point potential in other areas. This meant that it was difficult to find a battle in serious contention for more than an hour or so at a time. To mitigate this problem, the developers introduced a system that gave players on the side with fewer members bonus health and experience points, encouraging them to stay. This also caused controversy among gamers: one gamer said that the game was "becoming more like the University of Michigan every day" (referencing the affirmative-action debate).

TimeSplitters brought a creative solution to the problem in one game mode: the player in last place gets a strike team of rocket launcher-wielding monkeys dropping in periodically to help. The sequels have another mode called Shrink, in which players change size based on their rank on the scoreboard: maintaining first place means retaining normal size, but any drop in position causes the player to shrink, with the last place competitor becoming very tiny and difficult to hit.

Halo In Halo: Reach, the weapons you have when you blast off in the Sabre fighter determine what weapons you have when you board the Covenant Corvette. On harder difficulties, a poor weapon choice can dramatically affect how well you do on the Corvette level. Same with the two-part missions in Halo 2, where your weapons carry over from the first half of the mission; a poor combination can make things more frustrating, and if you quit and reload, you start over with the mission's default weapons. In Halo 4, this is the whole point of Dominion. Of course to make things fair some weapons randomly spawn outside on the field, away from the bases to give either the winning or losing team a upper (or lower depending on the player and weapon) hand. However, when the losing team loses their last base, the entire team enters a mode that gives overshields to help them win back a lost base. If they die, they stay dead until a base has been re-captured or they lose. In Halo 5: Guardians's Warzone mode, you earn more energy levels by kicking ass. Higher energy levels allow you to requisition more powerful weapons and vehicles, which allow you to kick even more ass and earn even more energy levels. That said, requisitioning weapons will reduce your energy level, with the most powerful ones setting it back to zero, and there is a cap on how much energy you can have at any given time.

This trope is very common in many modern FPSs with a leveling system: Kill enough people, level up. Level up, get better weapons. Get better weapons, kill more people. Kill more people, level up faster. Rinse and repeat. This is why many game with such a system also have some system where a player can obtain additional (entirely cosmetic) rewards by resetting their level to the minimum and clawing their way up again. The rewards for doing this may only be cosmetic, but they are still reflect well upon others' perception of a player's skill (or determination). Examples include Prestige Mode in the various Call of Duty games, and Prime Mode in High Moon's Transformers shooters.

Battlefield 3: Being an FPS with a level-to-unlock system, has this trope in hordes. However, it does try to avert this with pick-up kits and squad specialisations. The most egregious example is with regard to air combat. If your opponents have a good jet/helo pilot while you only have a decent jet/helo pilot, he probably already has loads of tasty unlocks and the skill required not only to cook your air support, but your tanks, your jeeps, your infantry and even your mobile anti-air. Considering that air-to-ground missiles are scarily effective on armor, this will not end well. Vehicles do have their own class of unlocks too. Tanks are the most egregious example here, with the penultimate unlock being a Canister Shell that does 50% damage to infantry and acts as a shotgun with 1km range. Essentially, they can snipe out infantry with random headshots. It is the vehicle vs infantry unlocks in general. Almost all infantry upgrades have a downside. Heavy barrel increases bullet speed, but also recoil while decreasing hip accuracy, the silencer hides the minimap ping and lowers recoil, but greatly reduces bullet speed. Reactive armor, smoke/flare or canister shells have no downside at all. Made even worse by the fact that infantry carried anti vehicle equipments do not have any upgrades at all besides unlocking them. Speaking more generally, in Conquest matches a losing team is extremely likely to KEEP losing. This is because flanking attacks and divide-and-conquer techniques are a major part of successful play... but a team that has been pushed back into their spawn area literally only has one direction to come from. They can't flank in any meaningful way, and the winning team is free to focus the entirety of its firepower on them rather than being forced to split their attention between multiple objectives. The losing team gets no advantages whatsoever. The Armored Kill maps are even worse. In addition to the usual jets and helicopters, it also adds AC-130 gunships and mobile artillery. Both of these powerful vehicles are tied to key objectives, which is supposed to allow a losing team to rush those points. The problem is that both the artillery and gunship are more effective the more of the map you control. A winning team can use artillery to fire straight into the enemy base without fear of reprisal, while the gunship kills backcappers from the air. A losing team, on the other hand, is likely to waste precious tickets in a rush to the gunship point only to have it shot out of the air by hordes of stinger missiles from the rest of the map.

Overwatch: Doing damage to enemies gives you charge for your Ultimate, and using Ultimates makes it much easier to win fights. So, when a team starts getting the better of fights, they can use their Ultimates more frequently, which helps them win future fights, which gives them more charge for future Ultimates.

Four X

Sword of the Stars: Being designed as a competitive multiplayer game, tends to invoke this trope. While a small empire can hold off a larger one almost indefinitely by building ships instead of researching, doing so will leave you far behind research-wise, making the outcome inevitable. To make things worse, the game is sufficiently random that you often 'start' with an advantage of this level, and smaller AI empires only band together if they have a decent chance of success - beyond that, they're smart enough to ally with the apparent winner instead. It does cut down on the mop-up period. On the other hand, you can also start with a disadvantage of this level, that you must work to overcome. The degree of randomness in starting positions and the amount of available customization in initial conditions is seen by the developers as an effective counter to the problem of unstable equilibrium, when viewed statistically over the course of a large number games. There's also the problem of the Zuul players having expansion as a racial requirement. As their planets are constantly losing resources, if they're not allowed to expand, the empire will eventually die.

Civilization The games in general suffer from this when it comes to the research-race. Players who start out in a location favorable to research, or know how to best balance early expansion and enhancement of existing cities to maximize research, will sooner be able to create buildings that increase research (Libraries, Laboratories) and - more importantly - build one-of-a-kind Wonders that can boost research or provide free technologies (The Great Library, for example), thus further increasing their lead in the tech-race. Next thing you know, they'll be knocking over your bow-and-arrow wielding sentries with tanks and tower artillery. Better hope you're playing one of those Civ-games where Rock Beats Laser. This problem is prominent enough that some players exclusively play on Pangaea-type maps so that they can stop any opponents who look set to skyrocket in research. The popular Civilization 4 mod, Fall from Heaven includes this trait, but also adds a new, militarized version in Baron Duin Halfmorn, a unique 'World Unit' which can be built by ANYONE, regardless of civilization, religion and civic choices - the ONLY such unit. (All other 'unique' units are cultural or religious heroes.) So basically, whoever first researches the necessary technology, gets to build him. Being a Werewolf, he has a high chance of turning any unit he kills into a Ravenous Werewolf, and if they survive their first engagement (even if it's only with an unarmed Worker), they turn into Blooded Werewolves under your control. These, then, have a chance of turning into stronger Greater Werewolves with every combat-success - and every type of werewolf has a set chance of creating more whenever they kill a unit. Thus, anyone good enough with tactics to make decent use of Duin Halfmorn and his spawn, are rewarded with even more, free units with similar power, essentially allowing a skilled played to BECOME The Virus. (Fortunately, there's an option to simply disable Duin Halfmorn from your game if you find him too unbalanced.) Civ V attempted to mitigate runaway city-building and warmongering. Unhappiness is increased every time another city is founded or annexed, and social policy and tech costs also increase with the number of cities one owns. This attempts to encourage you to not to spam cities everywhere, and only do so if you can be sure the city will pay off the increased science and social policy cost. The downside, however, is that this inadvertently made it so that playing tall (few cities, but high population) is far more advantageous than playing wide (many cities, but lower population), resulting in an odd situation where you have a 4X game that discourages 3 of those Xes. Civ VI, attempting to solve the paradox in V, made it so tech and civic costs are now static, but districts (special locations focused on a specific thing, like science or faith) scaled in cost instead. The downside is that this trope comes into play again, since it doesn't matter if your 20th Campus is going to take 100 turns to construct - it's not going to negatively influence your empire, so just forget about that crappy snow city and let it slowly build. VI also made it so that barbarians will come harass you more than in previous games, meaning that if an encampment spawned next to you you will probably spend the next 20 turns trying to clear the horde while other Civs got to expand. In a game where a second city early will likely double your science, culture and production, lagging behind in expansion is a really hard hole to crawl back out of.

Imperium Galactica invokes the trope deliberately: the Dargslans are live and expanding from day one, and you have to ascend to the Grand Admiral rank before they defeat the majority of your would-be allies to stand a chance in the endgame.

In Star Trek: Birth Of The Federation, a small empire will invariably be at a disadvantage, as research nets you bigger and better warships. For example, if you play as The Federation (which is, arguably, one of the most difficult factions to play) and dominate research, you will fairly quickly get access to the Defiant-class heavy escort, the most powerful warship in the game (available to the player). No other race has an equivalent. A single Defiant can destroy an entire fleet without sustaining much damage thanks partly to its cloaking device (which gives you a free turn at the start of combat). Additionally, if a weaker empire is constantly losing battles, the planetary morale will keep falling until the planets start seceding, which has further negative effect on morale, resulting in a domino effect.

Master of Orion The game takes steps against the boring mop-up period, not against this trope itself. Every so often, the game's warring star empires convene and vote on unification. Anyone who's supported by two-thirds of the total galactic population wins the game. Unfortunately the voting process is weighed against population; only the two most populated factions out of up to eight become candidates for the election, the vote of a faction is worth more as it grows on population, and the two candidates can, and will, vote for themselves. Its more of a mercy feature to prevent games to extend needlessly, as anyone who has the lead on the population race is often steamrolling in every field with little chance for anybody to catch up. Some races, especially in Master of Orion II, have clear advantages over others, creating inherent imbalance. Playing as the Psilons, who get all advantages from researching a technology and a research boost (normally, a player has to pick one advantage per technology and trade for the rest), or the Elerians (who can see all star systems from the beginning and can conquer planets using mind-control) usually results in them curb-stomping everyone in short order.

Galactic Civilizations 2: Large empires are just better at everything. Their greater size means they get more money from their higher population, can build more research facilities, and can build more, bigger and better ships. Plus, since friendliness is largely calculated based on military size, they will tend to start shaking you down if you're too far below them, further delaying catch-up.

Star Ruler A big offender. Getting many planets early allows you to get more research capacity. Research not only improves economic and military capabilities, but also begets more research. Play your cards right, you'll be out-researching and out-producing everyone while also building bigger and more advanced ships, spiraling until victory is effectively guaranteed. Bottling in the AI opponents early on is critical, as if you see waves of colony ships leaving their systems at about an hour or to into the game, you have already lost; the AI will expand exponentially and will build exponentially more powerful ships. The game tries to discourage you from colonizing too fast by having Space Pirates appear to blockade and raid undefended systems, but past a certain point in the tech race you'll have powerful enough weapons that even a puny task force can keep them off your backs. The sequel demonstrates Sequel Escalation from the first game. Early rushing to grab as many planets as possible is even more important than before, and this time the Space Pirates rely on hit-and-run tactics against trading ships rather than attacking weak colonies, which was used to dissuade wild colonization in the first game. On the other hand, other empires can annex planets or entire solar systems through diplomacy, especially in multiple small empires gang up on the larger one at the negotiation table.



MMORPG

World of Warcraft: Lake Wintergrasp: The PvP area Lake Wintergrasp deals with this by granting the faction with fewer players present the Tenacity buff, which gives them increased health, health regeneration, and healing power. In extreme cases, this can result in players with five times as much health as the opposition. Tenacity effectively rewards the side that's unable to gather as many players together to fight, since it's widely considered that the buff more than makes up for the lack of numbers. Of course, Tenacity doesn't help defenders because 3 players cannot cover 20+ points of entry from 80 or more players. It basically just enforces a tug of war. There's also a feature in Wintergrasp that makes the battle easier for the attacking side if they've consistently lost several battles, ensuring that control of the zone will eventually switch. Tol Barad has similar issues. There's no Tenacity, and it's much easier to defend Tol Barad than it is to capture it. This is semi-intentional, as capturing Tol Barad comes with huge rewards. Later Blizzard tweaked it to make capturing Tol Barad more easily possible. An example created via an Addon. The infamous "GearScore" addon calculate the (then hidden) item level of a player's equipment, and assigned them a number based on the average. This was meant to give raid leaders an indication of how well geared a player was, as certain content required a certain level of gear in order to be survivable. Unfortunately, GearScore really took off, and some raid readers began enforcing "Minimum GearScore" requirements for certain content. Often, the only way to achieve the required score was by equipping gear found only in the dungeon they were about to run. Blizzard eventually made item levels visible, and began enforcing a (considerably more reasonable) minimum ilevel to run content. Blizzard made the leveling easier and removed the penalty for death but is now finding that once players reach the top they are bored and half the gaming world is useless (i.e. too low a level to bother hanging around in) to players at the level cap. This was at least partially remedied with the Archaeology profession, as well as the Pet Battle system, both of which gave high-level players a reason to visit lower-level areas. World-wide level-scaling was also introduced towards the end of Legion, making monsters and rewards in given zones correspond to the player's level, within certain ranges, making leveling in what were once lower-level areas as profitable as higher-level areas.

EverQuest. Couldn't survive in this zone with your equipment? Have fun trying to survive naked if you die and have to make it to your corpse. In the old days, at least.

Obscure German browser game Power of Politics suffers of this. You can challenge other players to debates. Your chances of winning are determined (among other things) by your Ego, Publicity and Eloquence scores. What do you get as a reward for winning debates? Why, a portion of the loser's Ego, Publicity and Eloquence, of course.

Guild Wars 2 originally featured Orbs of Power in its realm-based player versus player combat, which provided large bonuses to whichever team possessed them. Since gaining control of an Orb of Power was rather difficult to start with, but keeping control was easy, the first team to take an Orb very rarely lost it. Add in an exploit allowing unethical players to take an Orb without being challenged, and it's not surprising that the mechanic was removed entirely. Having control of many supply depots also lets a realm upgrade their defenses and deploy offensive weapons much faster, which allows faster gain of more supply depots, which can eventually lead to another realm being repeatedly squashed at their home base. There are, at least, several vulnerabilities to this strategy, as defending every supply point on the map simultaneously takes a good deal of coordination.

Final Fantasy XIV's large-scale PvP mode, Frontline, gives players on a killing spree the "Battle High" and "Battle Fever" buffs (high for four kills, fever for eight), which increase damage dealt and result in your Limit Break filling faster. Given how a melee DPS job can very nearly kill squishier jobs (e.g. healers) with the Limit Break alone, this can lead to a juggernaut ripping through your team if they have their own healers focusing on them. The tradeoff is that a broken spree rewards the enemy team with more points.

EVE Online: There are generally two groups of players: Those with lots of money all the time, and those who constantly struggle to make a living. The ones who are always wealthy, usually have built up that wealth for so long that they have self-sustaining business empires within the game and often comprise the leadership of player-run empires. Needless to say, there are also many players who make a lot of money by successfully scamming and stealing from everyone else. There is a well known phenomenon that was discovered in the game's adolescent years, when the developers would introduce new features and benefits for new players to attract more of them; One veteran player stated that "Any new feature intended to benefit new players will ultimately benefit older more established players substantially more". This law has yet to be defied or disproved.

Champions Online gives you stars as you win battles and complete missions, and takes them away as you die. These stars give a boost to your stats, improving your healing abilities, the damage you do, etc. That means that doing well in battle makes your character more powerful, while doing bad takes your power away, making you weaker and hencefort more likely to die even more. You can buy star refill boosts in the in-game store at any time but, of course, this takes real money. If you've been doing certain missions you can get Questionite, which you can then exchange for store money at exhorbitant rates, but you'll likely find that there are many more useful things you could be doing with either of those currencies. If you're a free player, your better choice are vendors that will refill your stars for in-game gold but, of course, those can only be found in hub areas, and not inside dungeons, where you're more likely to need them.

Preventing this sort of thing and returning everyone to an equal starting point is a major reason why the Nexus Clash universe hits the Reset Button on the universe from time to time. There are still some things that get carried over from universe to universe though, and enough of them can add up to an advantage.

Mecha Game

Unstable equilibrium could hit the earlier versions of MechWarrior Living Legends pretty hard. Players start out each match with light assets and earn money by capturing bases, assisting teammates, and damaging enemies, which causes them to rank up, increasing their spawn money so they can buy bigger and more advanced vehicles. However, an early base capture rush by one team could give them a decisive advantage, which would only magnify unless the other team coordinated to take down the enemy's top players. After half an hour into the match, the rush team might be stomping around in Inner Sphere assault mechs and Clan heavies mechs, while the slower team was stuck in medium mechs. Comeback Mechanics introduced in the final update greatly reduced the likelihood of the curb-stomp battles by giving more money to players fighting larger assets - pulling an assault battlemech too early now is essentially shooting yourself in the foot, as the lighter enemies will get loads of money by shooting your slow mech.

The reboot to Steel Battalion does this in a rather nasty way. In order for you to get any upgrades at all, you need to attain a good performance rating from specific missions (which, incidentally, are also multiplayer capable). Particularly good players that can gain an A rank is awarded with many upgrades, especially the ones that can make your Vertical Tank much more durable (which is the most valuable upgrade, given the Nintendo Hard nature of the game). However, it is unlikely that new players know what to do, and most of the time, they cannot attain such a rank, which means later levels will get progressively harder and harder because simply surviving gets very, very hard without the upgrades to help them.

Platform Game

Mega Man: There are eight (six in Mega Man) Robot Masters that you have to defeat and you can do it in any order. Each one of them is weak against one of the other's weapon that you can gain with Power Copying. Once you have knowledge of their weaknesses, you can easily cream the rest of them once you beat one of them. But then it's all fair for the final level when you have all the weapons... at least until you realize that dying will not refill your weapon energy tanks, but it will remember which ones you've already picked up. When these weapons make getting through certain parts about 100x easier, and you use them all up, and then die and have to do that part again... Mega Man Zero is worse. In order to gain a new special attack from a boss, you have to get the highest rank in the stage - you have to be good enough to win without taking any damage or using any items.

Super Mario Bros.: The original actually has this pretty bad. Fire Flowers make it easy to plow through many enemies, including the otherwise tough Hammer Bros. (especially those not standing on overhead blocks) and all of the boss fights. But mess up or fall into a pit, and you'll have a much harder time. 8-3 and 8-4 in particular are bad examples; if you are Fire Mario and know your way through these levels, it's not too difficult to preserve that status and win, but if you make a mistake, you'll probably take a hit and lose the precious fireballs. These levels are exponentially harder without the fire suit, and after the 8-3 checkpoint or the entire level of 8-4, there's actually no way to get a complete fire suit again if you die once. Later 2D games also have lots of suits like this, many hidden, so in most games a simple Self-Imposed Challenge is done to avoid such suits. The game also has hidden 1-ups which are only collectible if the player collected all the coins in the preceding level...thus giving extra lives only to players who collect every coin and therefore have more lives to start with (as 100 coins = an extra life).

The Contra series has this in spades. The base bosses in the arcade version increase in difficulty the longer the fight drags on, but even in the console version, chances are the spread gun is the only thing keeping from becoming dog food. Lose the spread gun, and you will probably lose the rest of your lives in short order. In Super Contra, if you lose your weapon upgrades in Those Last Two Levels, you're as good as dead.

Castlevania takes away whip upgrades, sub-weapon and stored hearts whenever Simon dies. While the whip upgrades can be quickly regained, losing ammo and being forced to use an almost always worse sub-weapon generally makes finishing the stage much more difficult.

The first three Ratchet & Clank games don't return any ammo to the player if they die, making progressing through already difficult missions even harder if there are no vendors in sight. This is especially bad during the first game where ammo is more expensive compared to what you get (and numerous Cash Gates don't help matters) meaning you can completely run out of both ammo and money during the Final Boss. Deadlocked doesn't return ammo either, but since money is plentiful (at least compared to the ammo price) and the stages are short (thus usually you'll get respawned next to the vendor), this isn't that much of an issue in that game.

The same goes with Jak II: Renegade; especially painful due to the game's Nintendo Hard nature worsened even more by Checkpoint Starvation. Emptied 85% of your weaponry on that final wave and died? Now do the same without ammo.

In Blaster Master and its sequels, taking damage during the overhead on-foot segments downgrades your gun, which you need to have powered up for the bosses, especially the later ones.

In Super Valis 4, your score doubles as an experience meter, and reaching milestones gives you a powerup to your life bar. You have only one life, continuing removes all life-bar power ups, not to mention your carefully hoarded weapons and armor powerups, and the later stages of the game are designed with a superlong life bar in mind. Need several tries to beat the Final Boss? Have fun starting the entire game from scratch each time. (Or use an emulator with save states, but ...)

In Cave Story, any damage you take will also cause your weapons to lose XP and eventually de-level, so they deal less damage. You get that weapon XP back by killing more enemies—which of course becomes harder if your weapon loses a level. The upshot of this is that deliberately tanking damage is rarely a viable strategy. (Although there are systems to minimize the failure spiral. You can switch to a different weapon if your current one is depowered too far, and later in the game you can get weapons that are very powerful even at their lowest level. And the various bosses' projectile attacks can be destroyed for powerups, so the boss fights don't become unwinnable just because you took two hits.)

Puzzle Game

Invoked deliberately in Papers, Please much like the real-life poverty example. If you don't have enough money for food or heat, your family members will become sick. If you don't buy sick family members medicine (on top of the daily food and heat), other family members will become sick, requiring more medicine.

Pokémon Shuffle offers items that permanently enhance your Pokémon as prizes for competitions and escalation battles. Using them wisely (or in bulk) improves a player's performance in future competitions and escalation battles, allowing players who did well collecting the early items to collect even more of the later ones. In competitions, where items are awarded by regional ranking, the fact that the best players keep getting more items makes it harder for other players to get any items at all.

Racing Game

In Mario Kart grand prix, winning a race means you start the next race slightly ahead of everyone else; the players start in the order they finished the previous race. This is countered with the re-introduction of coins as of 7; racers start off with coins based on how far down the grid they are.

R4: Ridge Racer Type 4's GP Mode gives you a new car after the first heat, after the second heat, and before the final race. Your performance in previous races determines the quality of your new car. Get first place in every race and you'll get the best new car, allowing you to complete the next few races with ease. Place just high enough to qualify in each race and you'll get crappy new cars that will require perfect runs to even qualify in the upcoming races. This is on top of your team berating you for not finishing in first.

Sonic & SEGA-All-Stars Racing winds up like this, despite scaling the items' power like with Mario Kart. This is because of the unintentional advantage given to the driver in 1st place: Whereas drivers in 2nd and lower have a certain number of opportunities per race to get items to attack and defend, the driver in 1st gets the same amount and only has to defend. Sometimes, they don't even need to defend: Long range items that follow the track will often instead collide into an obstacle or hazard, or fall down a pit, and never even reach its target. In addition, there are items that, if dropped behind the vehicle, will attack whoever is the next racer to come across, which winds up strengthening the lead. It's not unusual for online races where whoever's in 1st place will finish half a lap or more ahead of the player in 2nd.

In general, racing games (particularly simulation racing games where taking the best lines through a turn is critical) will make it so it's easier to hold first place than it is to claim it, since the first place driver doesn't have to deal with other drivers occupying the road in front of them. Essentially, while everyone else fights to try to pass each other and capture the best racing lines, the driver out in first is always able to drive the optimal route without having to deal with those other cars and is able to strengthen their gap. Probably true in real racing to an extent as well.

Rail Shooter

The original Time Crisis, and its Gaiden Game Project Titan. Unlike later games, where the timer completely refills every section, it only increases by a certain amount for each area, also depending on your skill. So if you aren't fast and well skilled, you'll have less and less time for the subsequent areas, and when the timer runs out, it's Game Over. The timer also keeps running during the "Wait" sequences.

House of the Dead Throughout the series, failing to save a civilian often dumps you into a more frustrating alternate path. Not to mention that many of them give you extra lives, which you also get depending on your ranking at the end of each stage. House of the Dead 4 gives you a letter grade at the end of each level based on your overall accuracy, score, and "shot ratings" (number of headshots and headshot streak). Nb., you lose points every time you take a hit. S (which requires an absolutely phenomenal run) nets two life boxes, B (which takes some skill, definitely no gimme) or A earns you one box, and anything worse gets nothing. The result is that there's very little middle ground in this game; either you're an ace and can zip through the whole game in 1-3 credits or you struggle mightily and have to shell out. If you mismanage grenades, can't get headshots, or don't know the layout, be prepared to really pay through the nose.

Silent Scope EX gives you a letter grade at the end of each level based on speed, hit ratio, and headshots. An S rating restores 10% life, and a SS restores 25%. Lower grades have proportionately smaller benefits. Needless to say, if you're good enough to SS even one stage, getting through the whole game in a single credit isn't going to be a problem. If the best you can do is B, it's going to get expensive.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor has a score multiplier that increases as you kill enemies. Getting hit lowers it, and at over x10 (up to the maximum of x16), the decrease in multiplier gets worse. The multiplier penalty also seems to be biased towards multiple hits, so ten hits of 1 HP each, for example, tends to be worse for your multiplier than one hit of 10 HP. If you are bad enough, or have hit the time limit for a boss, the multiplier can even drop to x0, making everything you do worthless until you get the multiplier back up.

Real Time Strategy

Rhythm Game

In Elite Beat Agents and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, your multiplier is equal to your current combo. This means if a song has a maximum combo of 300, and you miss on the first or last note, it means not a whole lot. But miss on the 150th note, and your score can really suffer because your point multiplier only went up to x150 instead of x299. The effect is extreme enough that a perfect, but low rank run will likely score higher than an imperfect, but otherwise higher ranked run. Gets egregious in later levels when shooting for a high score. Every tap you do starting from 2x combo will tack on (12-Easy/25-Normal/50-Harder) points to the values of every 300 you get. 100s, not so much. This results in FC's having almost double as many points as regular runs, and in that over 30% of your final can be from the last segment alone. By the end of Ep. 15, a single 300 can be worth as much as 30,000 points.

In osu!, the freeware equivalent of Elite Beat Agents'', it is even more aggravating, since, in average, songs have much more beats to get combo (since breaks are much shorter, and there are several long songs), combos have a much more bigger impact in score. This means that, in order to get a score high enough to get considered for a ranking increase, FC's are mandatory (except in a few Harder Than Hard songs) (For a score to be considered for a ranking increase, the play has to be in the top 800 scores of the beatmap). Also, the way scoring works, it is possible for a play with 99.x% acc with 1 MISS to lose against a ~70% FC (or even less).

The BIT.TRIP series does this as well. Every beat successfully bounced/zapped/collected increases your base score per hit, and successfully hitting beats fills a meter that increases your score multiplier every time it becomes full. However, miss one beat (or fire a beam without hitting anything in CORE or touch a white beat in VOID) and your base score is reset, and missing too many beats fills a meter at the bottom that resets your multipler and sends you to a lower 'mode' where your scoring potential is reduced and you are closer to a game over. In CORE and VOID, this is taken even further in that there are modes that constantly increase your score and multiplier, but one miss causes a mode down and resets everything.

DJMAX attempts to strike a compromise: when you hit a note, you get a note judgment in the form of a percentage, and at the end of the song, the game averages your note percentages to produce your accuracy. Then there's the scoring system, which has the combo bonuses.

Flash Flash Revolution bases its point system off of both hitting notes properly, and the highest level your combo reaches on the song. Thus, it's often in your best interest to mash buttons in time with the music if you lose the rhythm of the song, as the points gained from keeping your combo up will negate the points lost by hitting buttons when you shouldn't.

In Guitar Hero and Rock Band (before Rock Band 3, which allows saving with no-fail on), nailing a star section gives you star power, which you can deploy on demand to make it easier to keep your health up. If you miss the star sections, you won't have the star power to BS your way through the tricky stuff.

In Cytus, the maximum score you can earn on any song is 1,000,000, which is earned by hitting every note with a Perfect rating. Just below that, there's the S rating, earned by scoring at least 950,000 points. You'd think that this means each note is worth 1,000,000 divided by the total number of notes, but actually, 100,000 of these points are based on your maximum combo. Missing a single note near the middle of the song will make it impossible to get an S rating, even if you hit every other note perfectly, while missing once near the start or end of the song will still result in near-perfect scores.

Roguelike

FTL: Faster Than Light: Pick up lots of scrap, take a minimum of damage and have good encounters, and you have good chances to go far. On the other hand, taking lots of damage and being forced by the Random Number God into poor encounters where you can't get much scrap will force you to use that scrap in repairing and hobbling on with poor equipment, which will further lower your chances of survival.

The Binding of Isaac: Learning how to game the system and avoid damage can take an experienced player much further than a newbie. Players that avoid damage on floors will earn Devil Rooms easier, allowing them more upgrades if they choose to do so. Avoiding damage also means that the player may have spare health laying around to use for various purposes, such as gaining money from a blood donation machine or taking on a boss challenge room knowing they can heal afterwards. Being able to find (and access) secret rooms is also a big deal, as these rooms often contain many coins or items. The coins allow the player to obtain more items from shops (such as automatic mapping and increased spacebar item usage) or pay off more beggars for items, while the secret room items include extra lives, a double Heart Container, and one of the biggest Game-Breaker items in the game in Epic Fetus.



Role Playing Game

Shoot Em Up

Simulation

This is the core of the economic part of Harvest Moon. Choosing Friends of Mineral Town for illustration, you start out the game with 500G. By the end of the first spring you can use foraging and turnip sales to earn yourself 30,000G, tool upgrades, and some animals. By the end of the first summer, you can take that 30,000G and make well over 300,000G from pineapples. By the end of the first Autumn, you can take that 300,000G and make well over 3,000,000G from sweet potatoes. 3,000,000G is enough to buy essentially all the purchasable things in the game.

Yes, Your Grace: The Player Character's revenue comes mostly from taxes paid by the general population. The gameplay is arranged in such a way that choices have to be made between helping people in need, army upkeep, and buying expensive items for the royal family. Helping people can increase taxes recieved, while refusing to provide help can decrease them. Getting too few taxes means not being able to afford the bigger material help packages or the salaries of the agents who can be sent to deal with problems on site, resulting in more people getting turned away. Because of this, a single turn of turning all petitioners away (or a few turns of accepting to help too few people) to be able to spend the resources on other things can result in a downwards spiral budget-wise.

War Thunder: in War Thunder, bringing airplanes to ground battles (and even more helicopters at higher tiers) can provide a significative advantage since you can bomb enemy tanks, even knowing in before where they are if one killed you thanks to the killcam, as long as you are a good enough player to use them effectively. The thing is, in order to spawn an aircraft you need to get spawn points by performing successful actions in game, and if you get them, it means that you are already doing well (i.e. killed enemies or capped zones). This means that more often than not, close air support in ground battles becomes a curb-stomp to an already struggling enemy, which is then forced to either spawn SPAA Gs (which are usually too weak to engage tanks) or fighters (which have limited ground strike capabilities) to counter the flying attacker, who now might as well return to a tank. After a game, destroyed vehicles become damaged and you can't deploy them again unless you wait for a countdown timer to expire representing off-screen free repairs. This timer ranges from a few minutes to even days or weeks, depending on the vehicle level and your crew skill. Alternatively, you can just spend some of the in-game currency to instantly repair the vehicles, the price is called "repair cost". In some cases, these are designed to act as some kind of soft balance in game, by limiting how often players can field some vehicles that are too strong for their level, but not enough to be put at a higher level, and are hard to balance in other ways (e.g. a propelled heavy bomber that has enough payload to destroy alone everything on the map and enough machine guns to fend off enemy planes, but can't be placed at higher tiers because it would face jets with missiles, becoming useless). When the after-battle repair costs become too high, players are induced to wait for the free repair timer, rather than spending their credits, thus the vehicle is less often encountered in battle. The developers even use an algorithm to track the performances of vehicles and automatically adjust repair costs, according to how well (costs increase in subsequent patches) or bad (costs decrease) are their battle statistics. The problem is, when repair costs skyrocket, the only players who use these vehicles are those good enough to take advantage of their characteristics to the max extent, while less skilled players avoid entirely for not wanting to even think of the bill. This leads to a vicious cycle: vehicles are used well by experienced veterans, their performance stats increase, their bills increase, other less skilled players don't use them so there are less battles with the vehicle being destroyed, veterans can use their overperforming machine against weaker opponents, the stats increase even more and so on. And since skilled players earned a lot of credits thanks to their performance, chances are they won't even care of repair costs because they can afford them, unlike less skilled players. Thus, facing vehicles known to have high repair costs usually means that you are also facing a very skilled player using a very good machine (with few situational exceptions), and if the game mode allows it, he/she will also have backups: good luck with that. Unless the developers also change the battle rating of that vehicle, then it will face stronger opponents and even skilled players will start to struggle. The new problem is, they too now avoid using the vehicles because either it has become unplayable or they don't want to pay constant repair bills that can't be mitigated anymore by scoring enough kills, instead waiting for weeks for the free repair. Since the vehicle is not used anymore as before, its stats don't change in a significative way and the algorithms don't change its repair costs, inverting the trope and also becoming a Catch-22 Dilemma. This has become absurd in late august 2020 when the american B-29, which suffers of insane repair costs, as been moved to a rating that puts it almost exclusively against jets. Almost every B-29 player stopped using it, unless in private sim battles where squadrons agree to simply bomb without interfering (a behaviour that further increases its stats, since the bomber doesn't get killed while also scoring a lot of points). Stock syndrome could be this as well. Many vehicles are very underwhelming or even unplayable when first purchased, requiring to unlock components that enhance their performance. High rank vehicles require a lot of research points to unlock these modules, which means annoying, painful, slowly grinding them through battles and battles, suffering many deaths until the vehicle becomes good enough (unless you pay with real money for a premium account, indeed). Thus, many players use less often those vehicles due to frustration. Skilled players, however, can manage to quickly unlock all the modules by winning somehow and then see a significant boost to their performance, at the expense of those who just got the vehicle or rarely played it. This too became particularly outrageous in august 2020 when stock projectiles for high tier tanks where changed to the weakest shells, which are nigh-to-useless. Those who get a stock modern tank now should expect increased suffering against other players that have armor piercing shells.



Sports Games

In Mario Super Sluggers, the better you play in a given baseball game, the more stars you will get. The more stars, the more star swings/pitches, and the more good plays that will net you more stars. So if you're doing poorly, it'll be hard to come back. Especially if your opponent has a ton of stars.

Stealth Based Game

The first two games in the Thief series have an interesting way to deal with this: The loot you steal on your previous mission is used to purchase weapons and upgrades for your next one, but any unspent gold is lost and the stuff you buy doesn't carry over to following missions, so there's no point in hoarding it. You always have to buy your entire loadout (except for a few default items) using only the gold you collected on the previous level. Deadly Shadows does away with this.

Survival Horror

Sweet Home combines Survival Horror resource management and permanent character deaths with RPG-style Random Encounters, i.e. infinite enemies. The game becomes an utter cakewalk if you can level up enough, because your party is always given first chance to attack, but it is a very big "IF."

Third Person Shooter

In the Star Wars: Battlefront series, a team who holds the majority of command posts will cause the other team's reserves to start dropping, thus creating an incentive to keep grabbing command posts instead of spawn camping and ending the game faster if one side gains a significant territorial advantage. This also occurs if one side destroys an important objective (Hoth's power generator, Endor's shield bunker). In the sequel, the game host can choose whether hero/villain characters are given to good players as a reward or to bad players to give them a a chance.

In Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault, the online mode can become this. Owning nodes will generate money for you, and capturing a node you haven't had in the game yet will let you acquire a new weapon. However, it's possible to shut the other player out by killing them when they try to get nodes and taking them for yourself. This will allow you to get new weapons and more money, which will let you put up barriers over the nodes you own and capture the other nodes faster due to being able to kill the enemies that spawn near them quicker. By doing this, you can leave the other player stuck with their starting Combuster (pistol), and no money to buy base defenses, player upgrades, or an invasion force to attack the enemy base.

An unusual example with Splatoon, but Splatfests in the American continents and in Japan wound up like this as time went on: You commit to a side when you begin (such as Cats vs. Dogs, Delicious vs. Disgusting referring to pineapples on pizza, or naughty vs. Nice regarding Christmas). When it's over, you're rewarded with Super Sea Snails, but you win more if the side you chose won more battles. note It's actually more complicated than that, and the actual winner is whichever has the higher value for (percentage of participants who chose that side) + (percentage of matches where that side won multiplied by any integer between 1 and 6 depending on the Splatfest), but most of the time, whoever won more battles was the winner of the Splatfest. American players and Japanese players soon noticed a correlation in whoever won more battles with that side's popularity, with the more popular team winning in Japan and the less popular team winning in the Americas. This pattern allowed people who didn't care which side they were on to accurately predict who would win the Splatfest, and it became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as the pattern became easier and easier to notice and it snowballed out of control. It was most pronounced in the American Pirates vs. Ninjas Splatfest, where only 28% of the players chose the Pirates side but were responsible for 59% of the wins. Shortly afterward, Splatoon got an update introducing the "Splatfest Power" mechanic to make it less predictable which side would come out on top.

Turn Based Strategy

In general, any turn-based strategy game that has persistent armies, unit dieoff, and no upkeep cost for maintaining old units will at the very least not inconvenience you for keeping old troops alive. In many cases, the game is balanced for a certain rate of dieoff, and going below that rate will make your army more effective, allowing you to avoid dieoff even further. (Heroes of Might and Magic is a good series to see this in action—it's possible to beat many scenarios in the fourth game without ever losing a unit.) Whenever goodies can be carried over into next scenario, there's a possibility to linger there after the last enemy base is crippled, hopelessly besieged and then left alive just enough to avoid triggering the victory condition — or, even better, spawn hapless XP fodder slowly enough to never become a genuine threat. Generally, units that require lots of XP to improve at least need to be carried through a few victories, but anything "balanced" only by being too expensive and time-consuming to build can be stockpiled at leisure. Time restrictions for a mission may avert this, or may shift the instability into early growth, because what little time you may get to prepare for the next mission becomes this much more valuable. Similarly, any strategy game that allows you to train powerful persistent Hero Units, especially across maps in a campaign, can lead to snowballing situations where your high-level heroes can take on entire enemy armies by themselves at the start of the map, plowing through any resistance and allowing you to secure an overwhelming advantage against your enemies. If the same goes for Design-It-Yourself Equipment, said Hero Unit easily turns into One-Man Army. Heroes of Might and Magic IV and Age of Wonders has this sort of a campaign system.

In more turn-based games, giving a player an extra turn for doing well (extra turn for throwing a six in a simple board game, for example) can cause this via too much positive feedback. Snooker offers an excellent examples of this; it not being too uncommon for fairly evenly matched frames between world-championship-level players to have frames won by over 70 points... let's just say the final of the World Championship is played as a best-of-35 for a reason. The PSP game Jeanne d'Arc would have the same problem, were multiplayer available: when the title character is in Limit Break, killing an enemy gives her another turn. It's not all that hard to set up the battlefield for her to leapfrog around one-shotting everyone. Another example is mancala , in which the objective is to pick up and collect as many stones as possible. At least one variant of the game is "solved ," mathematicians having worked out which pit to start with in order to guarantee yourself a dominant position.

The third Valkyrie Profile game, Covenant of the Plume, uses overkill damage to determine what rewards you get from Mistress Hel after each battle. Score a lot of overkill damage? You get extremely nice stuff, such as powerful weapons or in a certain route, an item that actually increases the maximum amount of Sin you can get from each enemy from 100 to 120. Score an insufficient amount? Good luck with the Realmstalkers, Hel's servants that almost force you to use the Plume just to get rid of them. Given that usage of the Plume automatically gets you closer to getting owned by Freya and/or the bad ending, but nets you enough points to outright ignore the overkill situation, it's probably her way of saying "you moron, you want to kill Lenneth or not? Don't fuck up. "

" In Battle for Wesnoth, every unit has a name, a level, and experience points. Units from previous scenario can be "recalled" in subsequent ones as an alternative to recruiting new ones, and this is pretty much the only way to succeed: you get already developed units right away, instead of recruited weakest units. The computer, on the other hand, can recruit preprogrammed loadouts of pre-leveled units by the bucketload. This tends to make things difficult if too many units die or you fail to soak up enough experience points early in the campaign.

Paradox Interactive's Hearts of Iron II avoids the problem of conquering empire becoming too powerful to defeat in a few ways: Whenever you officially annex a country, instead of receiving all of its IC (Industrial Capacity, the units of production in the game) and manpower, you receive only 20%. Recently conquered territories will not like being under your rule, and you will have to garrison a number of divisions of troops to prevent partisans from rising up against you. Supply lines are abstracted as your TC (transport capacity), which becomes strained as your army, your foreign conquests, and the aforementioned partisans grow in size. If these exceed your TC, the effectiveness of your entire armed forces will start to decline. The same company's Europa Universalis series also tries to avert this with its "Stability" mechanic: Every country has a Stability rating that fluctuates many times during the game, often being lowered by certain events. Stability affects both revolt risk and tax income. Where this trope comes in is that each province a faction holds adds a little extra to the cost of raising its Stability (though a nation's "core" provinces have much lower costs); an empire holding a large number of low-income, non-core provinces might actually cost more to keep stable than it's worth. Paradox games have another feature to avert this. They typically have an invisible "Bad Boy" score that goes up if you go on a conquest spree, which will (in theory) cause countries to unite against you before you can get big enough to run away with the game note This is most obvious in Stellaris , where you might easily take half an empire in conquest, only to find that the remaining half immediately creates several alliances after the war is over (you can't make an alliance while actively at war), even if their empire type is normally isolationist. In extreme situations, they may even create a Federation of several empires, or join an existing one

German strategy game Battle Isle has a predefined deployment of troops on the map of every scenario of the campaign, but these units can carry over their experience from previous mission. So it comes with a huge advantage to take care of your units. Battle Isle III even has an extra mission that deploys your units in such a fashion that you can't save all of them, diminishing the effects of this trope for the following final missions a little. ...which is why Advanced Strategic Command that started as its Fan Remake still doesn't have carry-over feature even after moving on.

Most of Nippon Ichi's games (Disgaea, Phantom Brave, Makai Kingdom, etc) have some game mechanic (repeated reincarnation in Makai Kingdom, failure fusion in Phantom Brave) that can be abused in order to make extremely powerful characters or equipment fairly early. While the games often have secret events, post-game storylines and random dungeons that will put these advantages to proper test, the main questline will be too feeble to offer any challenge.

Turn Based Tactics

X-COM uses this very hard. If you do well at the start, you'll have more money and therefore can hire more scientists, getting you better technology, improving your odds in battles, etc. This results in the game being very hard at the start but ridiculously easy toward the end. This is partially accounted for by more powerful aliens sequentially appearing throughout the game, and them being better armed, but not sufficiently to make the game's difficulty smooth. Many self imposed challenges have originated from this. Also, since soldiers gain ranks for participating in missions and killing aliens, the more you use the same soldiers over and over again (and therefore the more experience they get), the more incentive you have to keep using them, barring wounds, and the less incentive you have to level your reserves from scratch, especially in the late game. It may be jarring to get a top soldier wounded (or, worse, killed) and be suddenly forced to fill the spots with rookies and squaddies and level them all over again.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown changes the equilibrium to make the late game play very differently from the early game. To detect UFO attacks, you need to have satellite coverage over a country, but you start the game with only one satellite (out of 16 countries), and new satellites are prohibitively expensive (costing almost half of your starting budget for just one). Satellite coverage is necessary to get funding from the nation that the satellite is stationed over, and having all the countries of a continent covered by satellites also gives you a not-insignificant bonus. By the late mid-game, you should have all or almost all countries covered by satellites, giving you a significant amount of funding each month (so you can afford the expensive toys you've researched), prevents abduction events in all covered countries (keeping panic in check), and lets you focus on the tech and events you need to win the game.

Other

Tantrums in Dwarf Fortress are all about this. When a dwarf gets unhappy enough to throw a tantrum, they'll toss items around and attack other dwarves, both of which are crimes, and they'll be subject to Dwarven Justice for them, which will not make them happy. Best-case scenario, the player has built a Luxury Prison Suite specifically to counter this. More likely, the player has forgotten to build a prison at all and all jail times are replaced with beatings. Oh yeah, and if your fort is in bad enough shape that one dwarf will throw a tantrum, there are probably a few others right on the border of one, and if it happens to be their stuff tossed around or their nose punched in, you might be in for a tantrum spiral. Conversely, if your fort is kept really happy, a single dwarf randomly (or "randomly") suffering enough at once to throw a tantrum regardless won't be enough of a dent in the overall mood to have any further effect. The big 2014 content update is intended to shake this up a bit by expanding personality traits, so that some dwarves will react to unhappiness in more varied ways. How that will work in practice has yet to be fully tested.

In Wolf, you need to be in good form to hunt food and avoid human hunters. If you are injured badly (either through a hunter's bullet, prey animals fighting back, or a fight with a packmate over dominance), you will be unable to take advantage of your Sprint Meter, making staying alive much, much harder. While you might be able to find a carcass to eat from, good luck limping away from a human hunter.

In The Sims Medieval, starting a quest with low Focus can screw up most of the quest. When you have low Focus, you're more likely to fail at quest tasks or get bad results from responsibilities/chance cards. These events give you negative buffs, which cause you to lose even more Focus. And if you take too long recovering your Focus, you get Behind on Quest...which, you guessed it, decreases your Focus.

Evolve. A Monster that manages to stay ahead of the Hunters will get more time to feed uninterrupted, allowing it to Evolve more quickly and grow as a threat. However, if it gets caught early and often, it will end up wasting precious time in the Dome, and that's if the Hunters don't manage to do enough damage to get through its armour to its health. Health doesn't regenerate and isn't fully restored when Evolving, meaning Hunters can slowly but surely chip a Monster to death over a number of fights. However, if the player Hunters don't work well together, it is very easy for the Monster player to absolutely stomp them very quickly, even in stage one.

Other Examples:

Board Games

Risk is a mixed bag. As players conquer more territory, they get exponentially more troops. This means that the guy to conquer the most gets the most troops. However, this is to counterbalance the side effect of spreading your troops too thin. It also suffers from the mopping-up problem where someone is clearly going to win, but it will take a lot of die-rolling for it to be official. And of course, there's the human factor...

In Monopoly, someone who gets a good start (i.e., getting a monopoly early) will generally continue to win. And, like Risk, the mopping-up can take a looong time. (Worse, unlike Risk, it's hard to gang up on someone...). This was done deliberately by the game's first designer specifically to elicit anger from the losing players. She was using the game (then called "The Landlord's Game") to illustrate how poor wealth distribution screws over the lower classes — that it makes it impossible for them to succeed in any meaningful way unless they get absurdly lucky.

Chess has very strong elements of this. A player who gets behind in the opening development will have a very hard time catching up with his opponent. In a similar way, if one player manages to get a material advantage ("material" as in "combined value of all pieces"), that player will likely be able to exploit and increase said advantage. This means that, for advanced players, winning a game of chess is often a matter of getting that first advantage while preventing the opponent from doing so. This is the reason professional-level chess games almost never end in checkmate, with one player conceding when they determine their situation to be hopeless; not because Chess players are quitters, but because they understand how key the unstable equilibrium is in the game.

In Settlers of Catan, players whose initial settlements don't produce enough resources often wind up permanently blocked from expansion by other players busy building roads and settlements, both of which cost nothing to maintain and can't be removed. This is likelier to happen the more players are in the game. Though these unlucky souls lack the resources to do much of anything either for themselves or against opponents, their misery doesn't end until the game does. However, apart from being blocked off from an expanding player, the game mostly is an aversion. Doing well early on plants a big bullseye on your back from the other other players, and unlike a game of Monopoly, the players do have ways of ganging up on you and making you pay. A good strategy is play well, but not so well that it's obvious that you're winning. That's why the Development Cards exist. Mathematically, they're often not as great as the resources you spend to get them, but they are a way to potentially advance in position quietly for a surprise victory at the end. The Unstable Equilibrium exists more for losing (it's harder to come back) than for winning.



Card Games

Poker. While you get the same (random) cards whether you're down or up, a short-stacked player can't thicken the pot as well when he has really strong hands, and can't use the threat of a large raise to force players out and protect his "drawing" hands. While it is generally true that a large stack gives players more strategic options to play their hand and the possibility to win larger pots, this can quickly become an Inverted Trope for extremely small stacks. In a tournament, players who have less that 10 Big Blinds left usually only have the option to go all-in right away or fold their cards. This gives the short-stacked players a slight advantage by being able to force their opponents to make a final decision early on during a hand. During the golden years of online Poker, so many players exploited this "short-stack strategy" by buying into cash-games only with the minimum amount required (20 big blinds at that time), that virtually every poker site had to increase their minimum buy-in to 50 big blinds.

In the obscure Digimon TCG, the losing side is dedigivolved to their rookie form, while the winner remains the same. This basically means that whoever is winning after the first turn has a big advantage. They did try to use the RockPaperScissors mechanic to combat this unbalance (Vaccine (red) beats virus (yellow), Virus beats Data (green), Data beats Vaccine), and some digimon switch their color when digivolving. Though the other player can anticipate your switch and switch themselves.

Magic: The Gathering A player that can obliterate his opponent's forces has a few rounds of easy pain-causing before the other side can bring itself up to speed. The solution is often one of the "Wrath of God" cards that clean the whole board and re-equalize the situation. The concept of Tempo also highlights this — well-timed spells and abilities can be used to slowly gain total control over the flow of the game through card advantage, denial of critical spells, or even just by delaying the opponent, so a player who can snipe out critical spells or permanents can effectively cripple an opponent so badly, only the most unexpected spells or the worst possible draws can ruin their advantage. Of course, tempo can swing both ways, as a canny Aggro player can lure out a Wrath of God with a token army, then summon the real threat after making the opponent use up their mana and spells to stop that feint. This is part of the archetypal Green Ramp deck. Play cards that give extra mana, use the extra mana to get more mana, repeat until you can drop enormously expensive things early in the game. The game designers have mentioned doing this deliberately, arguing that being on the losing end of an Unstable Equilibrium is generally more fun and encouraging to a player than being involved in a game that has been forcibly stalled.

The WWE TCG Raw Deal has probably the most extreme example of this. The game has no mana; instead, you can play cards with a Fortitude "cost" equal to or less than the amount of Damage you'd already played. In other words, the more damage you've dealt, the more damage you can deal. They addressed this with powerful cards in the next expansion that only work if you're behind ... which then makes it more advantageous to be behind ... which was addressed with powerful cards that only work if you're ahead in the following expansion... and the cycle of life continues.

In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the player who knocks out a Pokémon gets to draw an extra card, which is a small but significant edge. The player whose Pokémon gets knocked out must discard any cards attached to it, which nearly every Pokémon requires in order to attack and may have needed several turns to build up, a substantial setback. Quite often, there has not been time to attach anything to any Pokémon but the one attacking, meaning the player whose Pokémon has just been knocked out must start all over while the other player still has all of the necessary attachments.

Legend of the Five Rings has central game mechanics built around an Unstable Equilibrium, as each of the paths to victory limits your opponent's options while expanding your own. Military decks attack the opponent's provinces, which limits the number of Dynasty cards they get. These include Holdings (used to pay for everything) and Personalities (used to do nearly everything). Honor decks can control the Imperial Favor, a bonus which has had a staggering number of different uses over the years. Dishonor decks force the opponent to pay extra for Personalities whose honor requirements they no longer meet (and in previous editions of the game, could prevent them from playing Personalities at all.) Enlightenment decks seek to play the five Rings cards, which is an Instant-Win Condition. The Rings themselves have extremely useful abilities. The aspect of the game that pretty much everyone agrees is its biggest flaw is the way the battle system resolves: once all players involved in the battle have finished taking actions, the total amount of force on each side is counted up. The army with less force, even if only by 1 point? Annihilated. And to add insult to injury, the winning player gains 2 honour for each card they destroyed this way, which can add up to an enormous surge in a large battle. If you don't commit everything you have to the battle, you risk losing, but if you do and lose anyway you'll basically lose the game in one battle, while the victor loses nothing (apart from any cards destroyed by in-battle actions like ranged attacks). The Yu trait was basically introduced as a direct attempt to limit the effects losing a battle can have on the game, but it's still generally considered a band-aid fix to a fundamental and unfixable flaw.

The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic card game by Enterplay uses Action Tokens to do more or less anything. The closer you are to winning, the more Action Tokens you get at the start of your turn. If you're only three or four points away from winning (out of fifteen points), you'll be rich enough to grab two points a turn without your opponent being able to do anything about it.

Downplayed in Mao. The more of the hidden rules you've figured out, the more likely you are to win a game. And when you win a game, you get to add your own hidden rule and penalize your opponents for breaking that in addition to the other rules they're still trying to figure out. However, it's unlikely that someone will gain an insurmountable advantage because good luck can compensate for incomplete knowledge of the rules.

Invoked in a family of card games known by names such as President , Daifugo , or Tycoon. The objective is to rid your hand of cards by playing cards that outrank the top card or matched set of the pile, or forcing everyone else to pass and starting a new pile with the card/set of your choice. At the start of each hand, the winner of the previous gets to take the two strongest cards from the loser's hand and give them any two cards in return (usually bad ones); the second-place finisher makes the same trade with the second-to-last finisher, but for one card. Thus, whoever wins a hand is the favorite to win the next hand as well.

Fan Works

This is one of the main reasons behind the Apple Trust's titanic power in RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse. Because they can afford to buy the latest Magitek and fix up their infrastructure when it breaks, they can produce far more crops with the same amount of labor, which in turn gives them more money and influence.

Gamebooks

The Lone Wolf gamebooks reward you for playing through all the adventures by allowing you to add an extra Discipline for each previous adventure you completed. By and large, these make life easier but don't give you a massive advantage. Until Grand Master. In addition to the Discipline benefits, you gain 1 Combat Skill point and 2 Endurance points for each adventure completed. The upshot is that the adventures actually get easier as you go, to the point where the ultimate mission... going alone into the evil god's universe and swiping a legendary artifact from his inner sanctum... is an absolute cakewalk.



Though this gets inverted in some of the later books, where having some of the items you get from previous books, most notably the Sommerswerd, will make some bosses exponentially harder, to the point where one boss is mathematically almost impossible unless you have a very specific set of disciplines, have gotten and saved every single stat boosting item you can get by that point in the game, have both of END and CS scores maxed, AND gotten a one of a kind potion in the third book that boosts your combat score higher then any other potion in the game and refrained from losing/using it until the boss battle, in the eleventh book. Even then it requires a lot of luck with the combat rolls.



It's notable that there are several fanon attempts to explain why it would be perfectly logical for Lone Wolf to NOT bring the only non-evil weapon in the world able to kill the Big Bad's with him when he invades one of their strongholds, just to make that fight easier.

Literature

Discworld has the "Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice" from Sam's own pondering on boots. A rich person can spend $50 on a good pair of boots that last years and years whereas a poor person can only afford a cheap $10 pair of boots that have to replaced much more often. Therefore on a long timeline, he spends twice as much as the man who can afford fifty dollars up front (and he would still have wet feet.)

In Children of the Jedi this is what makes it difficult to reach the control room of the automatied dreadnought Eye of Palpatine, which is a passage guarded by automated blasters. A Jedi can (and did) try and rush down it using the Force to deflect or avoid the bolts, but there are simply too many to avoid and each bolt that hits makes it harder to maintain the focus they need to protect themselves until they're overwhelmed. Callista (who died attempting this and only survived to describe the experience through Brain Uploading) describes it nicely. The more that hit you, the more that will...

A Drinking Game described in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy involves using Psychic Powers to pour a bottle of "Janx Spirit" into your opponent's glass, which they are then obligated to drink. It is noted that one of the side effects of Janx Spirit is suppression of psychokinetic ability, making the game harder with every round lost.

Pinball

This was the biggest reason why James Bond 007 flopped: It has a mechanic in which you'll begin with a set amount of time, and achieving certain things will add time. What results is that beginners get destroyed and can barely play before the game decides they're done, while experienced players who get to learn the rules can play and play until they get bored. In other words, this mechanic annoyed both beginners and experts alike, to where operators returned the machines and demanded refunds. This mechanic, in which players begin with a limited time and can extend it, was revisited by different companies with Flipper Football and Safe Cracker, both of which also flopped (though Safe Cracker would later be Vindicated by History).

Tabletop Games

Many Tabletop Games give injured characters penalties to their ability to keep fighting, which of course tends to result in rapidly decreasing odds of winning the fight. This is commonly called "Death Spiral", and whether it's a good or bad thing is a common cause of argument.

Sanity in Call of Cthulhu. When you fail a roll, your Sanity decreases, making it easier to fail rolls, to represent the descent into madness.

Blood Bowl had so much of a problem with this that most of the changes in the fourth edition were intended to fix it. They actually managed to do the exact opposite, and the so-called Living Rulebook was created to fix that damage. Nowadays Blood Bowl is more boring but also more balanced.

Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have special rules or cases to enforce this, but like any resource management game it can be a concern. In earlier editions, having one or two of your big spells fizzle can make your Wizard a walking liability (especially at early levels, before you have a few dozen spell levels full of backup fodder). In 4th Edition, the designers realized just how devastating it could be to a party's resource structure to miss with a Daily power, and so made most Dailies still have some effect on a miss (or, in the case of Reliable powers, not be expended until they hit). Essentially, most fights of average size last between three and five rounds, and missing out on a round's worth of actions for any reason can reduce your combat effectiveness by 30% or more. In a big setpiece fight with a solo monster you're Damage Racing, getting stunned or missing with your best shot can make all the difference. Several early editions of (A)D&D modify the amount of experience received for a game by a percentage based on the character's (class-based) "prime" attribute(s). So not only will e.g. a stronger fighter already perform better in combat than a weaker one because of the to-hit and damage bonuses resulting from that high strength — he or she will also advance more quickly just for being that strong and thus pull ahead of his or her weaker fighter-colleagues in that respect as well.

A problem in any sort of Turn-based Wargame, most notably Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Battle.: This is because both players will inevitably start out with the same amount of units, but one player will always go first. This means that he gets one turn to fire weapons at his opponent with impunity, which results in the other player logically starting with a handicap (as statistically some of his troops are going to bite the dust before he even gets to move). A lot of games compensate by having the player who goes first also place his troops first, so the second player has the compensatory advantage of being able to take his opponent's troop placements into account in his own deployments. In the above examples, the Reserves rule was implemented in 40k specifically so that you can hold some of your troops back from the initial volley of shots, at the expense of them not being able to do anything until they come in from reserves. The issue also compounds in bigger games; while theoretically the forces scale up and casualty percentages remain constant, the dice roll doesn't. If 10% of all your shooting would be ineffective, then it would greatly matter if that 10% would be enough to save a model or not. In small games, that might not be enough to actually remove a model, thus removing the opponent's combat efficiency. In large games you might have just removed an entire squad holding weapons unique to them.



Web Original

Ernest Adams discusses this trope from a game designer's perspective in two of his articles: "Balancing Games with Positive Feedback" and "Preventing the Downward Spiral" .

and "Preventing the Downward Spiral" . Danbooru has a limit to the number of images a user can upload at any one time pending approval. It increases with the number of approved images and decreases with the number of deleted ones, and anything that isn't approved within three days of upload is automatically deleted. This means that users who have an eye for good-quality art or at least the stuff moderators favour and thus get more approvals will be able to upload more, while users who haven't become able to discern good art or are disfavoured by the moderators will find their ability to upload gradually curtailed.

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