History Main / ParabolicPowerCurve

* The web RPG ''VideoGame/DragonFable'' recently had to rebalance their entire battle scaling system because fights at high levels were getting so tedious people would get bored trying to get through quests where every one of the 10 or 15 battles took 2 minutes to finish. It's been fixed now, though.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' had a multi-layered version of this: Sephiroth's stats during the final fight are determined by a number of flags activated by the player. The more of these flags activated, the stronger he became. Gaining levels above level 90 were among these flags, as were defeating [[BonusBoss either or both Ruby and Emerald Weapon]], [[GameBreaker acquiring Knights Of The Round]], [[InfinityPlusOneSword acquiring each character's best weapon]], and a couple other possibilities. Note that the fight is still fairly easy if you've achieved any of the above.

** It gets even worse if you have the ''Broken Steel'' DLC installed. Once you pass level 15, some new monsters start showing up (Albino Rad Scorpion, Feral Ghoul Reaver, Super Mutant Overlord, etc...) who are much tougher and stronger than anything that came before them, with the sole exception of the Super Mutant Behemoth. Unlike the Behemoths however, these [[NuclearNasty Nuclear Nasties]] ''respawn'' and these monsters are tough for a ''level 30'' character (someone who hit the level cap), let alone a level 15 player, and the Overlords are given an additional 35 points of damage with their Tri-Beam Lasers.

* ''Franchise/{{Civilization}}'': to prevent cheap strategies like founding hundreds of cities to grow wider and wider and simply submerge your rivals through sheer numbers, mechanics like corruption, inefficiency, health were gradually introduced to justify this trope when you build too many cities. You might think that creating an additional city in that fertile area with plenty of strategic resources might be a turning point for your faction, only to see unhappiness suddenly increase through all your dominions, possibly leading to revolts, decreased income and slowed production. It is not uncommon to see players reason if taking the hit and founding the city anyway or renouncing to those resources because its society is on the verge of collapse.

* In ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'', which is a spiritual successor to Civilization II and thus inherits all the above limits, introduce alien life: expanding too much might also trigger the sentient biosphere of the planet into considering your presence as too detrimental for the environment. That is, starting a planetary "immune reaction" with xenofungus growing and mind worm boils popping up next to your bases. Unless you master technologies and social civics that allow you to exploit the native life, you might find yourself seeing all your developed tiles being destroyed by the fungus growing, your units getting mauled, your pops killed and structures disabled by a mind worm attack.

* The ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' games and many of their cousins, some of the units have this problem. You can eventually build some of your characters to the point where they can one-shot most enemies easily, at which point they become nearly impossible to keep alive. What happens is, an enemy will move into position and attack. He'll get blown away on the counterattack, but the character will still take some damage. Once the attacker dies, the space he currently occupied is now free and another enemy will move into it, swing for some damage, die on the counterattack, etc. Repeat six or seven times a turn and many characters, particularly the more glass cannon sorts, can end up dead. It is particularly obnoxious with mages, who can easily kill many melee units (due to their low resistances) but having low defense against physical attacks themselves, can easily put themselves in this situation. Some very powerful units, however, either have so many hit points, such high defenses, or are so likely to dodge that they annihilate groups of enemies single-handedly.

** One side-effect of this is that items and enchants converted from the old rating system could be [[DiscOneNuke absurdly overpowered]] in the hands of low-level characters -- thus spawning a whole culture around twinking characters for battleground play. (Ironically, this made it so hard for normally leveling characters to compete in [=PvP=] that Blizzard eventually created a new bracket just for twinks.)

* ''VideoGame/BaldursGate2'': the Flail of Ages +3 is one of the best weapons in ''Shadows of Amn'' and you can upgrade it during ''Throne of Bhaal'' with two additional heads to become a +5 weapon with additional fire, cold, acid, electric and magic damage. Problem is, after the final upgrade the weapon also grants a free action status, which is basically useless against enemies by the end of the game (since they won't cast spells like entanglement or web, while you might be immune to hold or paralysis through many other means), but also prevents you to get the benefits of a haste spell or the boots of speed, which is crippling and annoying. To make matters worse, a programming glitch with the fully upgraded version of the weapon in the Enhanced Edition caused the game to check if a monster had immunity to fire, cold, acid, electric, or poison damage and apply that immunity to ''all'' the weapon's elemental damage instead of just the damage of that type. Since virtually everything in ''Throne of Bhall'' had immunity to at least one of those damage types, it meant that the weapon would rarely be able to deal any of its elemental damage.

** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' borrows the LevelScaling system from ''TES''[='=]s ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' sister series which helps to Downplay this trope especially when compared to ''Oblivion''. Most enemies simply get replaced by tougher variants in high-level areas, and while some do directly scale with player level the curve is now a lot less exponential with many enemy types having a level bracket with a minimum and maximum level (i.e. Sabre Cats have a minimum of lvl 5 and a maximum of lvl 11). Random loot also scales, as do many pieces of unique equipment (which makes it advantageous to wait to collect some of them, lest they become [[SoLastSeason less useful later on]]). It is still possible to grind non-combat skills and end up facing very difficult opponents relative to one's combat ability, although almost every skill has ''some'' combat utility if applied with creativity. Failing that, dungeons are locked to the level you were at when you first entered, so if you do find an area too difficult you can simply leave and come back later when you're more powerful, meaning the game never becomes straight-up unwinnable. Though due to how magic works in this game (doing a set amount of damage and having very little in the way to squeeze out more damage) spell slingers can find themselves being outmatched by tougher and tougher foes while doing the same damage they were doing levels ago.

* The [[DifficultyByRegion US and EU releases]] of RPG ''VideoGame/{{The 7th Saga}}'' altered level-up stat gains waaay downward, resulting in lots of ForcedLevelGrinding. It also had boss battles with other characters [[DynamicDifficulty at the same level as yours]] - but with the ''old'' stat gain formula. If you leveled up ''too'' far, their stats would outmatch yours to an unbeatable degree.

* ''Franchise/Civilization'': to prevent cheap strategies like founding hundreds of cities to grow wider and wider and simply submerge your rivals through sheer numbers, mechanics like corruption, inefficiency, health were gradually introduced to justify this trope when you build too many cities. You might think that creating an additional city in that fertile area with plenty of strategic resources might be a turning point for your faction, only to see unhappiness suddenly increase through all your dominions, possibly leading to revolts, decreased income and slowed production. It is not uncommon to see players reason if taking the hit and founding the city anyway or renouncing to those resources because its society is on the verge of collapse.

* As with the ''Manga/DragonballZ'', example above, this happens in an episode of ''{{Series/Charmed|1998}}'' where Paige magically grants Morris invincibility in which to stop a hostage situation. Unfortunately for him he [[PowerIncontinence can't turn it off]] and as the episode goes on Morris gets stronger and stronger, first he is impervious to bullets, then he starts pulling car doors off of his police car, then he accidentally tosses a criminal with his superstrength. At the end of the episode he sits in his wrecked office calling Paige and wishing for her to take it back. Then he crushes his phone in his hand.

* Partially averted in ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'', all skill rolls are made by rolling 3 six-sided dice and comparing the total to the skill level - a roll lower than or equal to the skill level succeeds, but a roll of 18 is always a failure, so there appears little benefit in increasing any skill over the level of 17. However, there are at least three aversions to this in the rules:

** In some circumstances, two characters may make directly opposed skill rolls - in such cases, higher skill is always an advantage.

* ''VideoGame/BaldursGate2'': the Flail of Ages +3 is one of the best weapons in ''Shadows of Amn'' and you can upgrade it during ''Throne of Bhaal'' with two additional heads to become a +5 weapon with additional fire, cold, acid, electric and magic damage. Problem is, after the final upgrade the weapon also grants a free action status, which is basically useless against enemies by the end of the game (since they won't cast spells like entanglement or web, while you might be immune to hold or paralysis through many other means), but also prevents you to get the benefits of a haste spell or the boots of speed, which is crippling and annoying.

** Spellcasters were subject to LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards, and as such they just got better. However, the math of skill checks and saves broke down so that at high levels, saves meant to challenge characters who were good at the save simply blew away characters who were bad at those saves. Likewise, eating a high-level monster's Full Attack when you were a SquishyWizard usually made you very, very dead. As a result, at low level, characters could drop to a single unlucky hit or blown save. At mid-level, characters could contend with occasional bad luck and had a host of abilities, leading to them reliably outclassing their enemies. And at high level, RocketTagGameplay ensues and the nice cushion mid-level characters enjoyed against their enemies was gone. It wasn't that mid-level characters were stronger; they were objectively weaker. However, enemies and spells scaled in such a wonky way that mid-level characters were far less likely to be stomped flat by one attack or one failed save than any other characters.
*** In other words: [[RocketTagGameplay Linear Defence, Quadratic Attack]].

* Justified in many Paradox games like ''Franchise/EuropaUniversalis'' or ''VideoGame/Stellaris'' where growing your nation bigger and bigger won't give the benefits of a stronger economy and a larger manpower, instead it will cause instability due to overextension, non accepted cultures in the realm, separatism, nationalism in newly conquered provinces and state maintenance for non integrated territories. Expect negative random events to trigger often, revolts and even nearby countries form coalitions against you. All of these mechanics are intended to prevent the player from blobbing too easily and snowballing. Often you better keep into your area and grow tall while developing colonies, trade, infrastructures and diplomatic ties instead.

* In ''VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey'', adding points to a character skill gradually increases its power. However at set points along the skill's progression (usually the last level of the skill, and the halfway point if the skill has a maximum of 8 or 10 levels), the skill experiences a spike in power...''and'' in TP cost, meaning that pumping up that ultimate attack skill all the way to max may actually make your character ''less'' effective, because now they burn through, say, 50% more TP for only a 20% gain in damage. So it may be best to leave the skill at level 9, or even at level ''4''.

** Ditto ''VideoGame/BattleForWesnoth''. Paladins vs. walking corpses and magi vs. almost anything are particularly poignant examples.

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* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' uses this intentionally. Stats granted by items (in particular, ratings that convert to a percentage increase in effectiveness like armor, critical strike chance, dodge chance, etc.) lose relative power as characters level up, encouraging players to seek better gear. This was actually done to avoid the problem of PowerCreepPowerSeep where, given a logical progression of gear at higher levels, players would eventually be running around with 100% crit, haste, dodge, etc., severely breaking game balance.