History Main / DiminishingReturnsForBalance

* To limit the effectiveness of evasion (long considered the OneStatToRuleThemAll 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.

[[folder:Sandbox Games]]
* ''VideoGame/PlanetExplorers'' has a placeable enhance machine which can strengthen a piece of equipment for a material cost. Any subsequent enhancements after the first will only be half as effective each time until the stat increases are negligible.

** ''VideoGame/EldenRing'' continues and elaborates on this system. All stats have tiers of non-linear growth. For damage-related stats, growth typically slows starting at 20, again at 50 or 55, and reaches a crawl past 80. Vigor and Mind only have two soft caps (40/60 Vig, 55/60 Min) while Endurance has one at 50. For magic stats, it's even more complicated: damage scaling of spells operates on a different scale than their individual stats themselves. After the second cap, the returns diminish so much that the only reason to invest more points in the stat is fulfill requirements to equip the highest tiers of weapons or spells.

** ''VideoGame/EldenRing'' continues and elaborates on this system. All stats have three tiers of non-linear growth. Growth typically slows starting at 20, again around 50 or 55, and reaches a crawl past 80. For magic stats, it's even more complicated: damage scaling of spells operates on a different scale than their individual stats themselves. After the second cap, the returns diminish so much that the only reason to invest more points in the stat is fulfill requirements to equip the highest tiers of weapons or spells.

* ''VideoGame/{{Splatoon}}'' has this manifest in several ways:

*** In spite of these measures, ''Splatoon'' and ''Splatoon 2'' players continue to minmax anyway, as many weapons benefit much more from certain abilities than others, and competitive players aim for particular milestones, such that they'll take both the diminishing-returns penalty and the long grind for the Ability Chunks to get exactly what they want. The Bamboozler weapons, for instance, are made much more effective by Damage Up in ''Splatoon'' and Main Power Up in ''Splatoon 2'', which increase the damage dealt with each shot on the Bamboozler. As most other abilities have little to no direct advantage, Bamboozler users will most often go for builds with large amounts of Damage Up or Main Power Up to the exclusion of everything else. The result is that this infrastructure not so much discourages minmaxing, but prevents the advantage from being too high against people who ''don't'' minmax.

* Skills in ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' start to give noticeably diminishing returns around level 14 (90% chance on normal tasks) and additional levels become a total waste of points at level 24 (90% chance on "impossible" tasks) except in the most extreme settings where techniques can have penalties of -30.

* In the second edition of ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'', each increase to an ability score adds +2 if it's below 18, but only +1 if it's 18 or higher. Unless you're trying to be a JackOfAllStats, you ''will'' hit this point at level 1.
* ''[[TabletopGame/ProseDescriptiveQualities Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies]]'': you only gain points to improve your abilities when you ''fail''. Characters who max out an ability and then focus exclusively on it are going to advance very slowly, if at all, while those who dabble in many things or throw themselves into scenarios where they've got no real skill are going to develop faster.

* ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'': Using a Punch Card while a Tough Glove is equipped provides +6 to attack. It can be done repeataedly in one fight, but doing so for the third time only grants a +3 bonus, which drops to +2 for each subsequent use.

** ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosUltimate'' also features diminishing returns on dodging. If a fighter dodges too many times in a row, their duration of intangibility keeps getting shorter, and their recovery duration keeps getting longer.

The second problem is that it doesn't always solve the problem of MinMaxing. 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.

** Certain weapons can be very effective on their own, but become a liability if the entire team is using them. For example, having a roller on your team is good because it can ink a lot of ground quickly and splat any enemy it runs over. Having a team of ''nothing but rollers'' is an uphill battle, because rollers have very little range and very poor vertical mobility. Likewise, having a charger on your team is good because they can splat enemies and provide support from a distance. Having a team full of chargers makes it very difficult to cover ground or combat any enemy that gets close.

* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' is designed with multiple classes filling different roles, so having too many of a single class will cripple the team in various ways. The Soldier and Demoman subvert this, as a 12-man team composed solely of them can unleash a [[MacrossMissileMassacre destructive barrage]] [[GrenadeSpam of explosives]] potent enough to take down anything short of an ÜberCharge.

** Luck has an even more pronounced point of diminishing returns, since its main effect is reducing the critical chance of enemies. The thing is, it does so at double the rate that Skill increases critical chance, so 5 Luck stops you from taking crit from anything with 10 Skill or less. Some enemies do have [[CriticalHitClass increased critical rates]] (for instance, a swordmaster or an enemy with a killer weapon), but those crit rates tend to be ''too'' increased for even very high Luck to completely negate them, so it's best to just play as if the enemy might crit you (for instance, sending in a character sturdy enough to survive a crit). Having ''no'' Luck is a major problem, but you really don't need much at all, and after that point, the only thing it provides is a boost to accuracy and dodge rate that's half of the one provided by Speed and a quarter the one provided by Skill.

** 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 hits an opponent. In ''Melee'', it caused attacks to deal reduced damage, but only barely affected the knockback they dealt. In ''Brawl'', 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 KO at 300% if fully decayed). With a mechanic that boosts the power of a fresh move also introduced, 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).

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. 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 MinMaxing. 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.

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 [[MinMaxing min/maxers]] who find the [[OneStatToRuleThemAll best stats]] and [[{{Whoring}} jam all of their points into them]] can snap the balance in half.

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.

* In some games the basic mechanics are inherently designed to create this. For example, any Tabletop RPG that uses a bell curve (e.g. 3d6) as opposed to a flat statistical probability (e.g. 1d20) for its core mechanic will get a version of diminishing returns: in a bell curve the numbers in the middle of the probability space are created by more of the possible permutations of the dice, while the numbers on the edge of the probability space are created by relatively few permutations. This means that changing a very low or very high number grants a smaller benefit than raising a number in the middle of the range.

* ''VideoGame/{{Hades}} uses this for boon levels offered through pomegranates; the higher the level already is, the less of a benefit the boon will get from an additional level. This operates independently from the added benefit granted by higher rarities.