History Main / DiminishingReturnsForBalance

** In ''VideoGame/Splatoon2'', you can use Ability Chunks to force sub-abilities onto your gear's available slots. However, if you already have the sub-ability on a piece of gear, the cost to add another copy of it will increase. For the first copy of the sub-ability, it costs 10 Ability Chunks, the second copy costs 20, and the last copy costs 30.

The second problem is it doesn't always solve the problem of min-maxing. There are usually a handful of stats that are the most useful in any game, it's just that one of them tends to be more useful than the others. Diminishing returns encourages players to dump points into the "best" stat or stats until the penalty is hit, then dump more into the second-best. If the system is not well balanced regarding stats in the first place, the net effect is that instead of focusing excessively on one, players will focus excessively on a small handful.

** Earlier editions of GURPS had the point cost of any skill double with each level, so increasing anything beyond +7 or so (depending on skill difficulty) would be ridiculous. Later editions made the cost linear with level, allowing for easy minmaxing with opposed skills (like swordfighting).

* Many classes in ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' become less effective when there are more of them. This is especially obvious with Spies and Snipers, as they are precision-elimination classes and have the least pushing capability in a push-based game. Not that this'll stop you from having eight per team, of course. The Soldier is probably the only exception; being the JackOfAllStats, a team of Soldiers is quite feasible at low levels of play.
* In contrast to ''[=TF2=]'', ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'' actually accounts for this at the hero selection screen — it will warn a player when their team has too many of a class or role (especially snipers) and point out roles that may be lacking (such as a healing character). Since it's also a push-based game, this can be valuable information for a player who wants to help turn the tide of battle for their team. Eventually, the game was patched to flat-out prevent you from playing as a hero someone else on your team is playing as already, even in casual matches.

* ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' uses hard and soft caps for some stats. Attack Speed and Cooldown Reduction hardcap at 2.5 attacks per second and 40% reduction, respectively, with no diminishing returns. Movement Speed has no hard cap, but two "soft caps" make it hard to increase past a certain point — raising your movement speed past one soft cap causes increases to have their effectiveness cut, and going past the second causes a steeper cut.
** ''VideoGame/DotA2'' also has similar hard and soft caps, but a certain character manages to disable the speed cap (which is 522). If an enemy hero has less than 50% of his health, Bloodseeker will not only get a speed boost, but will also disable the speed cap, making it possible to have its speed to go from around 370 to a whopping ''1500''.

* ''VideoGame/GranblueFantasy'' features the "Final Limit Break" or FLB stages for some weapons (101-200), summons (101-150) and characters (71-90 for SRs and 81-100 for SSRs), which are represented by a blue star. Not only do these levels tend to require higher amounts of Experience points to level up, they also provide minimal stat increments per level. In order to compensate, FLB weapons gain a new subskill, FLB characters gain improved passives and skill-sets, and FLB summons gain an additional aura effect.

** The series in general has long employed this trope. You increase your skills through successful use of said skills. Each time a skill is used successfully, the skill's progression will raise a percentage. (For example, if you strike enemies with a long sword, your Blade/Long Blade/One-Handed skill will increase.) Once that progression reaches 100%, the skill will increase one point. Once you gain ten skill increases, you go up one CharacterLevel. However, the higher said skills get, the long it takes to progress them. Essentially, it is very quick and easy to go from a total novice to adept in a particular skill, but is much harder and takes much longer to go from that point to maxing out the skill. Additionally, skill trainers charge exponentially more gold to train you at the very highest levels. (Though will all of the series' MoneyForNothing, this can be considered trivial.) This is why it is advisable to save [[RareCandy skill books]], which raise a certain related skill by one when read, until the skill is at a very high skill level. (Open your inventory and place them directly to save them for later, as picking them up directly will automatically open them for you to read.)

*** One major exception is Alchemy, which is severely unbalanced and is the perfect example of what can happen when this trope is not enforced. Not only can mass [[PotionBrewingMechanic potion brewing]] lead to numerous increases of the Alchemy skill (snowball effect), it will also give your base Attributes lots of free level-up multipliers, and, eventually, exponentially more powerful and expensive potions as your skill increases. Lots of money, lots of experience, powerful stackable buffs...all while doing very little. Additionally, this leads to the legendary [[TheSingularity Fortify Intelligence Stacking]] exploit and can ultimately result in a situation where the game crashes from mathematical overflow. Later games would heavily {{Nerf}} Alchemy, as well as work to prevent situations where you can stack skill increases in this fashion.

* The ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi Mario & Luigi]]'' {{RPG}}s award points into every stat automatically on each level up, and then let the player apply a bonus to one stat by timing a roulette spin. If one stat is getting too high, or you've used the roulette on the same stat too many times, the numbers on the roulette get smaller. There's always a 3 on the wheel, however, so with good timing, you can minmax any of your stats.
* The ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'' games had an interesting take on this trope, where the stat system only offered bonuses at certain intervals, which progressively decreased in frequency as the number got higher. You received bonuses to relevant skills, for example, at 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, etc., until finally stopping offering bonuses past 500. So, a stat of 15 and 16, for example, was functionally the same. This tended to make raising most stats higher than around 50 or so rather pointless, and rendered most minor stat gains worthless well before that.

** Its spiritual successor ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' has a soft cap of 40, but diminishing returns really hits hard at 50, in which the only reason you want 50 in that stat is for spell requirements (such as 50 Intelligence for White Dragon Breath and 50 Faith for Sunlight Spear). The exception is Carrying Capacity, which is tied with Endurance stat; while Endurance stops giving any stamina boost after 40, increasing it beyond 40 gives you one point of carry capacity per level, that is, a flat rate increase.

** In ''VideoGame/Fallout2'', and ''VideoGame/{{Fallout Tactics|BrotherhoodOfSteel}}'', leveling skills to 100 is done on a 1-for-1 skill point basis. Raising it to 101 costs 2 skills points per rank. This quickly accelerates so that, by the time the skill is close to its cap at 300, it costs as many as 6 points per rank. Raising skills so high has its benefits, especially in ''Fallout 2'', where certain very high skills (such as Science and Speech) unlock special gear, quest solutions, and even party members, if you're willing to specialize. Being able to blow someone's head off with a sniper rifle from across the map doesn't hurt, either, and you'll need a Small Guns above 200 to do it.

** Your damage taken in ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' is divided by approximately the ''cubic root'' of your Damage Resistance. This makes the early points very valuable (after clearing the threshold to do anything, about ~1/7 of attacks' damage; generally very easy to achieve), but subsequent points much less so — taking half as much damage requires getting about '''seven times''' as much DR. Consequently, while early game DR tends to be in the tens, PoweredArmor has to raise your DR to over a ''thousand'' to produce a noticeable effect.

** In ''VideoGame/Fallout1'', ''VideoGame/Fallout2'', and ''VideoGame/{{Fallout Tactics|BrotherhoodOfSteel}}'', leveling skills to 100 is done on a 1-for-1 skill point basis. Raising it to 101 costs 2 skills points per rank. This quickly accelerates so that, by the time the skill is close to its cap at 300, it costs as many as 6 points per rank. Raising skills so high has its benefits, especially in ''Fallout 2'', where certain very high skills (such as Science and Speech) unlock special gear, quest solutions, and even party members, if you're willing to specialize. Being able to blow someone's head off with a sniper rifle from across the map doesn't hurt, either, and you'll need a Small Guns above 200 to do it.

* A lot of fighting games use this to keep combos under control, causing the damage of the attacks to decrease by an increasing percentage the further the combo goes; it's called "damage scaling". For example, a LimitBreak move used standalone will do more damage than if it's used at the end of a combo.
** Some games will cause the first hit after an arbitrary number to automatically whiff/miss even if the enemy is still well within its hitbox[[note]]and not in a defensive posture that would negate an attack, such as blocking or dodging — which, due to hitstun, is almost always the case when a player is caught in a combo[[/note]], giving the opponent enough time to recover and counter. Some other games will make the attack cause less hitstun (i.e time where the opponent is helpless after getting attacked and open for another attack) the further in a combo it gets used, called "hitstun scaling".

* To limit the effectiveness of evasion (long considered the OneStateToRuleThemAll because it it could make units basically untouchable), newer ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars'' installments introduced "Evasion Decay": if any unit, allied or enemy, successfully dodges an attack, the next attack on that unit gains a cumulative bonus to its accuracy rate. This resets once the unit takes a hit.

* To encourage certain allied units to be flat-out tanking (namely {{Super Robot}}s) rather than have them dodge-tanking, newer ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars'' installments introduced "Evasion Decay": if any unit, allied or enemy, successfully dodges an attack, the next attack on that unit gains a cumulative bonus to its accuracy rate. This resets once the unit takes a hit.

* Most [[IdleGame Idle and Clicker games]] have this as part of the core mechanic, where the cost to buy one level of a resource producer or one level of damage increases. Due to this, the player is bound to hit a soft cap where they cannot progress any further, and as such most Idle Games also have a "[[NewGamePlus prestige]]" mechanic that resets your game but gives prestige points that either give a permanent multiplier bonus (for resource/damage or [[MoneyMultiplier money]]) or be bought to give a multiplier.

* In the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' series, each game has a mechanic known as [[http://www.ssbwiki.com/Stale_move_negation "stale-move negation"]], which causes an attack to become weaker the more frequently it is successfully used (as in, it hits an opposing hitbox). In ''Melee'', it wasn't much of a factor, as while it caused attacks to deal reduced damage, it didn't affect the knockback they dealt (thus your finishers will still KO at nearly the same percent they would fresh, regardless of how often you used them[[note]]we say "nearly" because damage dealt is a component of the knockback an attack deals, so even though stale-move negation doesn't affect a move’s knockback scaling or base knockback, the damage reduction still causes a slight knockback reduction[[/note]]). In ''Brawl'', it's much more severe, with knockback now being affected; the knockback power of a move will decrease rapidly with each successive use (for example, a move that could KO around 100% fresh will not even KO at 300% if fully decayed). With the freshness bonus also being introduced (a mechanic that boosts the power of a fresh move by 5%), there's a large disparity between the knockback power of a fresh move and a move that has been frequently used, making the strategy of not using your primary KO move(s) until your opponent is at KO percent actually viable (rather than just being an ideal tactic). It's a double-edged sword, though; while this rewards players who plan appropriate use of their KO moves and punishes those who used them haphazardly, it causes a few moves to be overly powerful at comboing into themselves, which then causes the characters with such moves to be very hard counters to those that are especially vulnerable to them (Pikachu's down throw is the most infamous example, being a chain throw that causes massive damage, if not directly leading to an outright [[http://www.ssbwiki.com/Zero-to-death_combo zero-death]], on several characters because of this).

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' uses this for the duration of stuns and similar effects on other players to prevent "[[CycleOfHurting stunlocks]]". Defensive stats also use them to encourage tanks to invest in all forms (if available to them) rather than just one. Hard caps are also in effect in some cases, but Blizzard is trying to get rid of those or change things around so they can't be reached.
** For instance, there is a hard cap for armor. At some point, druid tanks, helped by a generous armor multiplier to compensate for leather equipment and lack of shields, could easily push past it. Many healers also had a talent to increase a player’s armor for a short time after healing them with a critical effect. This was then addressed by several means, such as changing the armor multiplier to only work on specific types of items and the healer talent changing to a plain damage reduction effect.

** It was very necessary, as the Inventions System that came out a few years later gave many newer ways to enhance powers, which would have been absolutely game-breaking if there were no diminishing returns. Inventions also had the side-effect of making many previously unfeasible builds into very effective ones that can rival the most powerful of the pre-diversification builds. If anything, MinMaxing was made even better.

Linear scaling stats has its problems. If a player spreads their points out between each of their statistics evenly or accrues small bonuses in one stat or the other, the effect is perfect... but min/maxers who find the best stats and [[{{Whoring}} jam all of their points into them]] can snap the balance in half.

One way to mitigate this effect is to make every point of a stat after a certain threshold have less effect on that stat than the last one. You can alter the coefficients as necessary for each attribute, and if you do a smooth enough job nobody will notice. The game works as it should and everyone's happy.

Of course, diminishing returns has its troubles. First, it's a lot more work, and takes a lot longer time to playtest and get just right. Second, if it's done poorly it just makes the game mechanics confusing; explaining to the player that, above a certain point, each point of Dexterity only provides 36.74% of the benefit of each previous point makes your game sound arcane and confusing. And if you don't explain it to them, astute players will feel cheated when they realize that they pushed all of their points into Strength and are getting no appreciable benefit from half of those stat points.

The second problem is it doesn't always solve the problem of min-maxing. There are usually at a handful of stats that are the most useful in any game, it's just that one of them tends to be more useful than the others. Diminishing returns encourages players to dump points into the "best" stat or stats until the penalty is hit, then dump more into the second best. If the system is not well balanced regarding stats in the first place, the net effect is that instead of focusing excessively on one, players will focus excessively on a small handful.

* A lot of fighting games use this to keep combos under control, causing the damage of the attacks to decrease by increasing percentage the further the combo goes; it's called "damage scaling". For example, a LimitBreak move used standalone will do more damage than if it's used at the end of a combo.
** Some games will cause the first hit after an arbitrary number to automatically whiff/miss even if the enemy is still well within its hit box, giving the opponent enough time to recover and counter. Some other games will make the attack cause less hitstun (i.e time where the opponent is helpless after getting attacked and open for another attack) the further in a combo it gets used, called "hitstun scaling".
* In the VideoGame/SuperSmashBros series, each game has a mechanic known as [[http://www.ssbwiki.com/Stale_move_negation "stale-move negation"]], that causes an attack to become weaker the more frequently it is successfully used (as in, it hits an opposing hitbox). In Melee, it wasn't much of a factor, as while it caused attacks to deal reduced damage, it didn't affect the knockback they dealt (thus your finishers will still KO at nearly the same percent they would fresh regardless of how often you used them). In Brawl, it's much more severe, with knockback now being affected; the knockback power of a move will decrease rapidly with each successive use (for example, a move that could KO around 100% fresh will not even KO at 300% if fully decayed). With the freshness bonus also being introduced (a mechanic that boosts the power of a fresh move by 5%), there's a large disparity between the knockback power of a fresh move and a move that has been frequently used, making the strategy of not using your primary KO move(s) until your opponent is at KO percent actually viable (rather than just being an ideal tactic). It's a double-edged sword though; while this rewards players who plan appropriate use of their KO moves and punishes those who used them haphazardly, it causes a few moves to be overly powerful at comboing into themselves, which then causes the characters with such moves to be very hard counters to those that are especially vulnerable to them (Pikachu's down throw is the most infamous example, being a chain throw that causes massive damage, if not directly leading to an outright [[http://www.ssbwiki.com/Zero-to-death_combo zero-death]], on several characters because of this).

* ''Videogame/EYEDivineCybermancy'''s stats become increasingly expensive (level-up points wise) once they're past level ~30. At level 100, it can take a dozen points to level up one stat. Cybernetics cost more brouzouf with each upgrade - and require the expensive [[{{Whatevermancy}} Necrocybermancy]] research past tier 6 - to compensate for the massive bonuses given by upgrading.

* In contrast to ''[=TF2=]'', ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'' actually accounts for this at the hero selection screen - it will warn a player when their team is has too many of a class or role (especially snipers) and point out roles that may be lacking (such as a healing character). Since it's also a push-based game, this can be valuable information for a player who wants to help turn the tide of battle for their team. Eventually, the game was patched to flat-out prevented you from taking a hero someone else on your team is playing already, even in casual matches.

* To encourage certain allied units to be flat out tanking (namely {{Super Robot}}s) rather than have them dodge-tanking, newer ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars'' installments introduced "Evasion Decay": if any unit, allied or enemy, successfully dodges an attack, the next attack gains a cumulative bonus to its accuracy rate. This resets once the unit takes a hit.

* ''VideoGame/DragonSaga'''s archer classes have a skill that lets them juggle enemies in the air by holding down the 'Z' key. Predictably it quickly became one of the most hated exploits even after more broken ones were found. One attempt to fix it saw its damage gradually decrease to 30% over consecutive hits... with no other change, meaning that the only 'improvement' was that the victim survived longer in a helpless state.
* ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' originally let you add as many of a type of 'Enhancements' to a power as you liked, leading to builds that were far and away so much better than anything else that there was no reason to use any different kind of enhancement build. This led, eventually, to The Great Diversification, when this was instituted, making every enhancement of the same kind give less return. The returns diminished so harshly that anything over three of a kind was useless. The net effect was to make the game overall more difficult and to weaken linear, straightforward powers that only benefit from one type of enhancement. Certain powers and builds became useless overnight.
** It was very necessary as the Inventions System that came out a few years later gave many newer ways to enhance powers would have been absolutely gamebreaking if there were no diminishing returns. Inventions also had the side-effect of making many previously unfeasible builds very effective ones that can rival the most powerful of the pre-diversification builds. If anything, MinMaxing was made even better.
* Multiple damage or defense upgrades in ''VideoGame/EveOnline'' employ Diminishing Returns. The first such module has full effect, the second approximately 80%, and after the third a fourth becomes near-pointless.
** Something similar happens with skills. Each skill typically gives a 5% increase per level to it's relevant modules, but the training times increase exponentially for each level, so you may need only an hour to train the skill to level 1 and unlock the first 5% boost, but it will take a month to train it to level 5 and unlock the final 5% increase.
* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' uses this for the duration of stuns and similar effects on other players to prevent "stunlocks". Defensive stats also use them to encourage tanks to invest in all forms (if available to them) rather than just one. Hard caps are also in effect in some cases, but Blizzard is trying to get rid of those or change things around so they cant be reached.
** For instance, there is a hard cap for armor. At some point druid tanks, helped by a generous armor multiplier to compensate leather equipment and lack of shields, could easily push past it. Many healers also had a talent to increase a players armor for a short time after healing them with a critical effect. This was then addressed by several means such as changing the armor multiplier to only work on specific types of items and the healer talent changing to a plain damage reduction effect.
** Trade skill leveling works in a similar fashion. Early on, it's ridiculously easy to cook spiced bread with inexpensive flour and spice you can get anywhere or make cheap potions with flowers common as dirt but as you increase your skill it becomes harder to increase it further. Ingredients needed to craft become rare and expensive and it often takes multiple attempts to actually gain a skill point, each attempt consuming the reagents regardless of a possible lack of skill gain.
* ''VideoGame/ChampionsOnline'' implemented this feature fairly early on to balance out the downright insane returns people were getting on Dex/Ego builds (things like critting on almost half your attacks for almost double damage). They instituted a "softcap" partially determined by the character's level that seems to be working well as a compromise; low level players see better returns early on (Dex became a feasible defensive stat BEFORE the late teen levels). but the higher level min/maxers can still push their stats high enough to get noticeably better performance from their characters.
* ''VideoGame/ERepublik'' skill training works like this, in the case of strength when you start out you gain .5 every time you train, by the time you hit 4 strength this is down to .04 every time you train.

* ''VideoGame/RagnarokOnline'' inverts this before its renewal patch for its offensive stats; while the cost to increase a stat went up as it got higher, you'd get bonus damage when you reach certain points (for example, every 10 str points gave a melee attack bonus). This bonus grows as you reached higher and higher stats, to the point that oftentimes that it was worth paying more for the higher stat (so you'd have less total stats), if it meant reaching a damage bonus. The renewal patch changes this behavior.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has status ailments occur in shorter intervals if you keep applying the same type to the same target over and over again. For example, Sleep will last for 30 seconds, and then 15 seconds if inflicted on the same target again, and it keeps growing shorter from there. Luckily, the diminishing mechanic also applies to enemies so they can't cheaply put you in a stun lock. However, players and enemies can have multiple status ailments of the same kind inflicted on them at once if they were hit by different attackers, so it's possible to have 20 players all inflict the basic Poison status with full strength on a boss character since each Poison effect is coming from different people instead of the same player multiple times.
* This is a common point in ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'', where almost everything - damage resistance, elemental resistance, combat frequency, you name it - eventually hits a point where diminishing returns kick in hard. Unlike many massively-multiplayer games, ''Kingdom of Loathing'' didn't ''start'' with many of these: they were added later on, in order to create a balanced situation.

* ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' uses hard and soft caps for some stats. Attack Speed and Cooldown Reduction hardcap at 2.5 attacks per second and 40% reduction, respectively, with no diminishing returns. Movement Speed has no hard cap, but two "soft caps" make it hard to increase past a certain point-raising your movement speed past one soft cap causes increases to have their effectiveness cut, and going past the second causes a steeper cut.
** ''VideoGame/DotA2'' also has similar hard and soft caps, but a certain character manages to disable the speed cap (which is 522). If an enemy hero has less than 50% of his health, Bloodseeker will get not only a speed boost but will also disable the speed cap, making it possible to have it's speed to go from around 370 to a whooping ''1500''.

* The ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi Mario & Luigi]]'' {{RPG}}s award points into every stat automatically on each level up, and then let the player apply a bonus to one stat by timing a roulette spin. If one stat is getting too high, or you've used the roulette on the same stat too many times, the numbers on the roulette get smaller. There's always a 3 on the wheel, however, so with good timing you can minmax any of your stats.

* The first ''VideoGame/{{Geneforge}}'' used the ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'' version of this trope--going from 10 to 11 in a skill, for instance, does nothing, whereas going from 10 to 12 provides a bonus equivalent to going from 9 to 10. From 10 to 20, the bonuses came from even numbers only, and above 20 bonuses were only gained at 23, 26, and 29. This incidentally meant that getting one point of a skill from a quest could just mean that you'd be capable of getting a bonus if you were willing to buy another level of the skill. Later games replaced this with the ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' system of having higher levels cost more points--in that case, the only problem is that it encourages [[MinMaxing minmaxers]] to get their free quest-related bonuses as late in the game as possible, so as to maximize the number of skill points saved.

** Its spiritual successor ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' have a soft cap of 40, but diminishing returns really hits hard at 50, in which the only reason you want 50 in that stat is for spell requirements (such as 50 Intelligence for White Dragon Breath and 50 Faith for Sunlight Spear). The exception is Carrying Capacity, which is tied with Endurance stat; while Endurance stops giving any stamina boost after 40, increasing it beyond 40 gives you one point of carry capacity per level, that is, a flat rate increase.
** ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'' both plays this straight an inverts it: ''all'' stats have diminishing returns and the soft cap is still at 40, but the points from 30-40 are worth considerably ''more'' (about 50% greater return per point) than the first thirty. Some advantages of a stat won't even show up ''at all'' below a certain value, for instance spells won't start getting extra casts until you get attunement above 20.

** Your damage taken in ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' is divided by approximately the ''cubic root'' of your Damage Resistance. This makes the early points very valuable (after clearing the threshold to do anything, about ~1/7 of attacks' damage; generally very easy to achieve), but subsequent points much less so--taking half as much damage requires getting about '''seven times''' as much DR. Consequently, while early game DR tends to be in the tens, PoweredArmor has to raise your DR to over a ''thousand'' to produce a noticeable effect.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' (both 3e and 4e) uses a variant of this in their point-buy system for stats - The modifier value derived from your stats remains constant for easy math, but the ''cost'' of each stat grows faster the higher you get.
** This only applies for new characters - points gained from leveling (and from items or spells) have no diminishing returns, although the cost of most magic items grows quadratically with the benefit.
** Older editions also increased the Wish cost for raising stats: if your stat was anything between 1 and 15, then a Wish spell would improve it by +1, but if your stat was already 16 then each Wish would only raise it by 1/10 of a point; if it was 20 or more, each Wish would increase the stat by 1/20 of a point! This was back in the day when the Wish spell aged the caster by five years, and required a System Shock roll (basically a Fortitude save) to avoid instant death (with success merely leaving you bedridden for a week).
* Similarly, the ''TabletopGame/NewWorldOfDarkness'' tends to encourage evening out one's portfolio past a certain level -- each new dot in a category typically costs its new rating multiplied by a flat rate, so buying the fourth dot in an Attribute from the third costs twice as much as buying the second dot in an Attribute up from the first. Similarly, the character-creation rules make the fifth dot in a Trait (out of a normal maximum of five dots) cost twice as many of starting points to buy.

* ''TabletopGame/SeventhSea'' has an unusual version of this. Each game session a player starts with a number of hero points equal to their ''lowest'' stat. If unused, these hero points become experience points at the end of a session. Depending on your sessions this can increase your net gain somewhere between 50 and 100%. So the character who put two in all his stats will gain experience points faster than the person who has a wit of 1 and a finesse of 3. (and this lets him earn his third points faster, causing the divide to grow even faster)

** Having multiple copies of the same ability on year isn't very helpful, because every duplicate ability will provide less of a boost. For example, having one "Ink Saver" ability gives you a decent boost, adding as second one gives you a much smaller boost, and adding a third is mostly pointless because the boost is so small as to be negligible.

*** Alchemy, meanwhile, is [[GameBreaker broken beyond all belief]] and is the perfect example of what can happen when this trope is not enforced. Not only can mass herb mixing give you lots of Alchemy skill (snowball effect), it will also give your base stats lots of free level-up points AND eventually absurdly powerful and expensive potions as your skill increases. Lots of money, lots of experience, powerful stackable buffs, all while doing very little. Additionally, this leads to the legendary [[TheSingularity Fortify Intelligence Stacking trick]] and can ultimately result in a situation where the game crashes from mathematical overflow. Later games ''heavily'' {{Nerf}} the Alchemy skill in order to prevent this, though they include workaround using other skills.
*** Due to a bug, the Mercantile skill is broken at 50. Up to 50, the price decrease of all merchants' goods makes sense, as a high skill level indicates that you are better at buying and selling. After 50, things start getting ''more'' expensive once again. Thankfully, many {{Game Mod}}s exist as unofficial patches to correct this issue.

** The player level cap is 16, but the {{level locked|Loot}} Weapons and Resonators can only go up to Level 8. Instead, the benefits of Level 9 and beyond other than increased recharge range and efficiency and increased XM capacity manifest in the form of one-time Field Kits that provide various items as rewards.

** In ''VideoGame/Fallout1'', ''VideoGame/Fallout2'', and ''VideoGame/{{Fallout Tactics|BrotherhoodOfSteel}}'' to 100 is done on a 1-for-1 skill point basis. Raising it to 101 costs 2 skills points per rank. This quickly accelerates so that, by the time the skill is close to its cap at 300, it costs as many as 6 points per rank. Raising skills so high has its benefits, especially in ''Fallout 2'', where certain very high skills (such as Science and Speech) unlock special gear, quest solutions, and even party members, if you're willing to specialize. Being able to blow someone's head off with a sniper rifle from across the map doesn't hurt, either, and you'll need a Small Guns above 200 to do it.
** Your damage taken in ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' is divided by approximately the ''cubic root'' of your Damage Resistance. This makes the early points very valuable (after clearing the threshold to do anything, about ~1/7 of attacks' damage, which generally very easy to achieve), but subsequent points much less so--taking half as much damage requires getting about '''seven times''' as much DR. Consequently, while early game DR tends to be in the tens, PoweredArmor has to raise your DR to over a ''thousand'' to produce a noticeable effect.

* ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' originally let you add as many of a type of 'Enhancements' to a power as you liked, leading to builds that were far and away so much better than anything else that there was no reason to use any different kind of enhancement build. This led, eventually, to The Great Diversification, when DiminishingReturnsForBalance was instituted, making every enhancement of the same kind give less return. The returns diminished so harshly that anything over three of a kind was useless. The net effect was to make the game overall more difficult and to weaken linear, straightforward powers that only benefit from one type of enhancement. Certain powers and builds became useless overnight.