Unpopular Opinion: If Jagex is Worried About Power Creep, You Should be Too

Title. Jagex, the actual devs of the game, are far better at evaluating power creep than the player base. They have a better sense of the future road map of bosses/gear. And they've done modeling and run calculations.

In mostother game on the market, game devs handle balancing issues because players tend to value short-term rewards over long-term balancing and game integrity.

It's amusing to me to see players, on one hand, bitch about how OP Shadow is, while simultaneously crying about there being not enough power creep.

Shadow is the mess is it BECAUSE OF THE PLAYERS. This whiny community bitched about ToA not being "rewarding enough," just as they bitch now about the Delve boss not being rewarding enough. Just how they bitched about Nex not being rewarding enough. So Rewards were completely reworked. Shadow came out busted and needs a nerf, and the Fang had to be nerfed as well.

I really do not trust the players on this one.

Power creep is a real issue that affects us all, even if its pernicious effects are hard to see in the short run.

I really don't want to play another "Gear Treadmill" like World of Warcraft. I love that OSRS keeps older bosses relevant with niche and horizontal reward progression. It's nice to have to grind for a variety of different items of gear, rather than have to replace a small set of gear every 6 months from the new end game boss that shits powerful, game-breaking rewards.

It's also nice that older bosses still pose some challenge, which matters for things like Combat Achievements.

Jagex clearly thinks the game is best served by avoiding extreme power creep. I think players should heed this warning. Devs have more visibility into this matter than you do. I also think people are underestimating both the difficulty of the Delve boss and how strong the proposed rewards already are

Finally, please stop using Nex as the blueprint. The Nex reward/drop table was a mistake. With the exception of Nex, all end game non-raid boss content is perfectly in line with the Delve Boss in terms of rewards. If anything, the Delve boss is on the more rewarding side, dropping essentially 4 BiS (3 boots + necklace) and a niche weapon.

Delve Boss (as proposed) is more rewarding than: Coliseum, Inferno, Corrupted Gauntlet, each individual DT2 boss, and Nightmare/Phosani's Nightmare. The only more rewarding content are raids and Nex.