What is power creep?

[EFR-11282]

You say something is power-crept based on comparison.

Generally new heroes are added to the game power-crept in comparison to older heroes, which creates a new threshold of power level to compete with, making older heroes outdated, so they get buffed too.

Classic example: Genji buffs
They explicitly explained that Genji’s buffs were given to him to compete with Echo and Doomfist, post-released heroes.

You can read it yourself here:

@Molly

We are generally trying to find a stronger niche for Genji, especially now that he’s competing against both Echo and Doomfist as a mobile burst damage hero. (…) We feel both of these changes are getting us closer to our overall goal of bringing Genji in line with our other mobile burst damage heroes.

Another example are Ashe’s buffs, despite the fact that she was a post-released hero, there was already a damage output threshold to be competitive and she wasn’t achieving competitiveness:

@Molly

We recently made some updates to Ashe’s gun (The Viper) to increase the power-level of her Primary and Secondary fire. We like how The Viper is currently playing, but Ashe is a bit too powerful overall.