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If anything the problem with lol is a power creep in their champion and base number design because while they have been introducing more mechanics at the same time they have made these mechanics a lot more easier to use with a lot less effort. In effect saying that designing incomperables takes "more skill" is actually the inverse when discussing league of legends.
There is certainly a lot to be said about how league of legends actually suffers a major power creep that designers won't actually see because it isn't just about the numbers but also just making the game a lot easier to playing a specific class or champion over others.
A principle that if more game designer kept in mind power creep would become less of a problem. Yes I recognize that there would be still ways for power to creep up.
Naturally, this means that you also need theoretical skills - that is, experience - flying a ship with a particular fit to be any good at it, but even someone with no experience can be useful. Every fleet can find a use for hero tackle.
"I like how Fighting games or RTS's arn't mentioned for incomparables in game design and balance. They live and breathe on incomparables and skill based mechanics. I know there is frame data for fighters and build orders and attack timings unit composition and blah blah blah, but seriously, Why are the only games mentioned RPGs?"
A: Probably because power creep does not apply to games with instanced worlds (games where everything occurs within its own set story timeframe, world and characters - anything that happens in a sequel to that game is a different instance, even if it is a continuity of the predecessor). Power creep occurs to games where there is an expansive continuity where the world not only becomes bigger and more complex in time, but is also persistent and continuous - so that you would be able to carry over a Lv 0 Rusty Wooden Sword for sentimental value (vital to killing the Hyper Planet Golem-Titan, because it has a weakness to weakness - Lv 0 items are instakill to it) into a game where your primary weapon is a Lv 90 Plasma Quadruple-edged Runeblade Of Arcane Nightmares With Special Sauce. Come on, think about it - what you're talking about is like saying "How come you're only talking about how fish thrive in the ocean? why aren't you talking more about how lions thrive in the ocean?"
If you want to talk about power creep in things other than RPGs and MMOs - try the Dragon Ball anime series - Piccolo used to be a nemesis to Goku. The Dragon Ball franchise now consists of the goodies and baddies shitting planets on each other, and Piccolo is all like "yeah fuck this shit, I don't want to live on this planet anymore".
Combobreaker has a point: Fighting games and RTSs also have power creep issues to keep in check (and LoL IS a type of RTS), but the qualities that create the creep are often harder to see than numeric value-obsessed RPGs. Fighting games were likely not discussed in this video because fighting game characters almost never earn new abilities over time and make other fighters/abilities obselete. That said, it is a wonder that so many fighting games manage to harbor a huge roster of characters with roughly equivalent chances of winning even at the top levels of tournament play due to timing tricks and such.
Power Creep goes against their business model, that is, buffing characters to increase the income they generate from new skins, making OP characters on release then nerfing them as soon as the buying rush slows down, ignoring low-popularity characters letting them sit in the pool of mediocrity for years at a time just because they aren't selling well, I could go on all day.
2. Cards just became more powerfull. Synchro pushed away fusion with it's easy summon system (just 1 weak tuner + 1 weak non-tuner = 1 powerfull Synchro Monster instead of specific monster + specific monster + fusioncard = stronger Fusion monster)
Basically power creep existed but was a lot slower then it was in most other games as it wasn't about straight numbers from equipment it was about the overall power of a build that could be achieved by having access to additional options.
Not sure if I've voiced my thoughts clearly here or not but I hope you get the idea.
On the other hand, if I'm understanding incomparables properly, the Pokémon TCG dives headfirst into it. From the 3rd generation and onwards, every set has been filled with cards that do weird stuff, often drastically changing the rules of the game, that quite often have no immediate benefit. If a rule can be bent or an effect can be had, chances are a card has been released that does it. As a result, in unofficial "Unlimited" play (meaning all cards are legal), there are a number of older cards that, despite ever-increasing HP and attack power (Boundaries Crossed Charizard laughs at Base Set Charizard with its 160 HP and 150 damage with fewer drawbacks), have effects drastic enough to keep up with the newest cards (or, by chance, can combo with them well).
Of course, if we're talking about the video games, Game Freak has avoided power creep remarkably well while still providing new options for competitive players. Base stat totals have been roughly the same since the beginning, for instance, and same goes for the power of attacks. We just now have more unusual and specialized ones. It's not uncommon to see Pokémon from previous generation become more useful after a long period of disuse--it just happened to Venusaur and Ditto, for instance.
First, the glass ceiling. That game added "relic weapons"—THE top-tier weapon of the game, requiring years of grinding and hundreds of millions of gil—around the first or second year of the game's life. As a result, six years later, as they added more weapons into the game, they were stuck adding situational weapons, sidegrade weapons that may work better or worse with certain builds, or slowly chipping away at the chasm between auction house gear and relic weapons. While glass ceiling pieces like relic weapons did stymy power creep largely, it did make it hard for developers to create any new gear that the players saw as worthwhile without breaking the ceiling. This was normally accomplished by making truly great gear exceptionally rare and/or grindy. FFXI was unabashedly an older-school grindfest of an MMO.
Second, dear Altana the inventory space issues. Limited inventory can sometimes be a deliberate design choice. I only have space to bring three sets of gear with me, plus some potions and utility items, so I must choose wisely! FFXI wore out its welcome in this regard, though. As a standard, most mages (starting at midlevel) were expected to keep eight different weapons in their inventory! Expected! And it wasn't like you'd level out of them; they were top-tier mage weapons until several expansions later. The developers tossed in more-and-more situational gear, and inventory space never really ever scaled (the devs always cited system limitations that literally made it impossible to upgrade. Solutions like Mog Locker and Mog Satchel were visibly duct-taped on). Add on top of it that the game's Job system had you only playing a single player who could change between all jobs, rather than creating alts for each class as is the standard in most MMOs, and now you don't have space to level your tank because you have no place to stash your eight mage weapons on the same character.
Third, not retiring content is a double-edged sword. True, the WoW model, where no one wants to run content from the last expansion because none of the rewards are worthwhile, stinks. But so does "needing" to run content from six years ago, because it still holds one-of-if-not-the-best DPS leg pieces. So players "need" to run content whose difficulty has been trivialized by improved playstyle strategies, whose design is rudimentary and less enjoyable than new content, whose age made it miss out on key enhancements like _instancing_. Yes, a true old-school game, some of the early yet still "necessary" content was added before instancing was popularized by games like WoW, and this old content was never retrofitted with instancing support. So at best, server guilds would need to share a calendar and cooperate in a civil manner. At worst, botting. Not to mention, old content is still "needed" by your guilds' new members, and each new expansion added more content that everyone "needed". Most guilds had to pick and choose which events they did. Belonging to multiple guilds—one for Event A, one for Event B—was not uncommon, and players would simply apply and quit as they earned the gear they needed from each event.
Now, I'm not bashing FFXI. I played it 6-7 years and my masochistic heart still misses it. Having dabbled in more traditional MMOs, I can obviously see the downsides of feature creep, and advantages of horizontal growth. It's not a silver bullet, though, and requires its own set of cares and attention from the developers. I'd certainly like to see a game that took the lessons learned here, and build upon them. Sadly, Square Enix never made a sequel to FFXI *sticks his fingers in his ears and starts singing loudly*