You guys will probably enjoy this level of gaming autism because I've been quietly studying the meta maths of both RPGs and RTS' in the background to get a much more detailed understanding. Even though I enjoy RTS campaigns etc. pretty casually I'm not that great at RTS games in multiplayer and I've been studying professional matches and how they play as part of my learning process regarding the maths of that genre of game and how build orders work etc. Mainly studying their overall macro but it was interesting seeing how the micro/meta side of things worked too.
I've also been studying RPGs quite a bit since that's another favourite genre of mine and really been getting into how the maths for the classes work. One thing I've been quite confused by is how it seems that there definitely seems to be a strange bias I would argue towards fancy new classes and units when they get introduced in patches.
I think this also happens though to the point they kind of break the older content in the game making it rather imbalanced even in singleplayer. Obviously devs are going to want players playing the new stuff but I was unprepared for just how much of a buff this type of thing got.
Can you guys think of specific examples of what I'm thinking about? Like content updates and such? Warhammer 2 is a great one because I remember every faction introduction people would complain they were too OP then eventually CA would fix them slightly with a nerf. Thinking of the Vampire Coast and Wood Elves mainly on that one. It's one of those things where once you notice it you can't unsee it and sometimes they're often even quite sneaky about the crap they pull with stealth updates.
I bring this up because in RPGs I actually enjoy the classic fighter/mage/rogue archetypes. However it seems like more and more with 'modern RPGs' you almost get punished for picking them depending on the situation.
There are two things you are missing here.
The first is your nostalgia goggles. You are most likely far better at games now, then you were when you were 10. This will lead to the perception that builds you do now are more powerful than builds back then.
The second is op interactions or combos. Suppose that in a given game there are certain percent of op interactions, say 10%, or 5%, 1%. The specific number doesn't really matter. As a game's lifetime goes on, the number of possible interactions for two effects increases as the number of effects squared. Similarly the number of possible interactions for three effects goes as the number of interactions cubed. Thus if there are only the three archetypes with say five abilities each then there are 225 two ability interactions and 3375 three ability interactions. Now when we increase the number of classes to 10, there are then 22500 two ability interactions, and 3.3 million three ability interactions.
This leads to a situation where you will more rarely get a setup with an op interaction using just the three archetypes, compared to when you mix in one or more of the more exotic classes.
It's just math.