Trope Finder

sounds like you want either Character Tiers or Fake Balance's Balance through imbalance or Perfect Imbalance Internal Subtropes.

Note that it's very important to watch that you don't let yourself fall into Scrub or "Stop Having Fun" Guy traps with those; sometimes things like Power Creep or blatantly strange imbalances are intentional to break up Complacent Gaming Syndrome or create Skill Gate Characters- say once you learn what you're doing with Bob, his 10 in that stat that goes to 4000 starts to look like a Power Limiter to cancel out his near-broken move set. (Case in point, I've made people rage-quit using servbot in Marvel vs. Capcom 2)

Thanks for the reply—I am a Johnny kind of player so I have done some studying of game balance myself. I understand the Scrub mindset and the "Stop Having Fun" Guys mindset. This is for the cases where the imbalance permeates the game so thoroughly that it's blatantly clear to anyone who plays the game, and where it's pretty clear the designers don't care about balance. It's not even Fake Balance, as that implies there is at least an attempt to look balanced. In these cases, they're not even trying to hide it.

The example I was thinking of, by the way, is Pokémon GO: All Pokémon have a single stat that dictates how well they'll do in combat, which is CP. The thing is that there are certain fully evolved Pokémon with maximum CP many times higher than others, and no one has thus far found any practical advantages to a Pokémon with lower CP. There is no hidden potential, no Comeback Mechanic, and no side-mechanics that could possibly give a Pokémon with lower CP any sort of advantage. (There's been no confirmation from Niantic about this imbalance—they've not spoken a single word about it. Pokémon GO is their very first game that has any sort of competitive aspect behind it, so while it's just speculation, I would bet that they never encountered a situation making games before that would require thinking about balance.)

Another example would be the first Dragon Ball Z CCG: In that game, character's power levels reflected how they were like in the source material, and that was their main concern. If Character A fought Character B in the series and didn't stand a chance, the game was designed such that Character A could never prevail over Character B, at least not without a lot of luck and a disproportionately large amount of backup (and even then, they might not ever win). The designers seemed to think players played the card game to relive the series without thinking that no one wants to be on the losing end.

I guess all in all, what I am bugged about is not the games themselves as much as the assumption in the game balance pages that game designers all care about balance if they are making a game with head-to-head play. If a designer has never played against anyone, or they've only played against other people locally with house rules, or they dedicate themselves to tier lists and ignore anything not at the top, they might not necessarily understand what the big deal is about this "balance." And I know for a fact that these people exist—I have worked with some before. (I bailed out of their project soon afterwards though.)