Comment by hinkley

And because a merchandising push in many games may be another 10-50 items, the first couple times the % increase is high but the magnitude is low (.5s to 1s) and by the time you're up to 1000, the % increase is too small to notice. Oh it took 30 seconds last week and now it's 33.

Boiling the frog, as it were. This class of problems is why I want way more charts on the projects I work on, especially after we hit production. I may not notice an extra 500ms a week, but I'm for damn sure going to notice the slope of a line on a 6 month chart.