Biggest pet peeves in gaming

[TomataEighty9]

56 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

 

 

Did you really just tell someone their totally legitimate (and coherent) post was "unnecessary"...

 

... then follow that statement with 8 paragraphs of diary-entry, self-obsessed waffle that has nothing to do with anything?

 

 

its not his first rodeo… dont even try with him

 

i almost Got a depression Reading his posts on here…

[Baranov_925]

Unskippable cutscenes, low FPS rate.

[dieselmanchild]

19 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

Your opinion is all over the place. @dieselmanchild got straight to the point. This is semantics. 

 

Jesus. This thread really went nuclear overnight.. Happy Easter to you guys too. ????

 

I just want to state for the record that I totally understand the point DrBloodMoney was trying to make and I do agree with him. While I certainly don’t think boosting is unethical or whatever, his underlying point that “boosting” generally goes against the nature of how a game and it’s trophies were intended to be earned when they were designed by the developers is entirely true.
 

As trophy hunters, the trophies in these games tend to be front of mind for most of us as we play, and so we’re usually looking for ways to obtain them as efficiently as possible, which usually means grouping together and artificially creating the scenarios required to make it happen. This is especially true for the ones that are very difficult or extremely unlikely to achieve in natural scenarios, even if they were intended to be achieved as such (AEOTM from ACB being a prime example of this).

 

The only reason I bothered posting was because I thought his pet peeve was kind of silly and overly bogged down in the minutiae of the language being used rather than what people obviously mean when they say this. And since we were on the topic of pet peeves, pedantry has long been one of mine. I wish I hadn’t bothered though as it just created a big fight.

 

Now tell me, who has a pet peeve of PSNP threads going off the rails? ?

[DrBloodmoney]

1 minute ago, dieselmanchild said:

Now tell me, who has a pet peeve of PSNP threads going off the rails?

 

HOWDAREYOU!

 

My pet peeve is people asking whether other people have pet peeves about threads going off the rails!!1! ??

 

 

[dieselmanchild]

10 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

HOWDAREYOU!

 

My pet peeve is people asking whether other people have pet peeves about threads going off the rails!!1! 

 

 

Oh my! Well perhaps you will let me share some of my chocolate with you to make up for it. The Easter Bunny was generous this year! 
 

Happy Easter folks. ?

[AJ_Radio]

@dieselmanchild I don’t agree with boosting being necessarily going entirely against the nature of how games were intended to be played. 
 

I can totally understand for instance, if say a sequel to Destiny 2 were released. Destiny 1 & 2 are multiplayer centric games, where you work together as a team of players. If a group of people were specifically boosting and putting everyone else at a severe disadvantage, then the developers would likely punish those that boosted. It creates an atmosphere where normal players can’t compete. 
 

Every trophy hunter on this website has cheated or used some exploit to his or her advantage. The Jak 2 orb glitch. Skipping a portion of a game. Downgrading to earlier patches so the Comrades DLC trophies in Final Fantasy XV could be obtained. On and on and on. 
 

My pet peeve is when I’m having to do multiplayer trophies in a tacked on multiplayer mode that require multiple people. This goes right back to Brotherhood on the PS3. Neither you, nor @DrBloodmoney nor @TomataEighty9 seem to get where I’m coming from, at least that’s how I feel from the responses. If you guys all disagree, that’s great. 
 

A lot of PS3 era titles had a tacked on multiplayer. It was basically a trend that was popular. 
 

You always have the choice of not bothering to do said trophies and move on. 

 

All DrBloodmoney did was start a fight. I don’t agree with everything he said, just like I don’t entirely agree with everything you’re saying in regards to boosting. 
 

For some games, you can play and earn all online trophies normally because there is still an active playerbase. For others, especially old PS3 games, your only choice if you want to earn those online trophies in a reasonable time frame is to boost. 
 

Ask the people who played MotoGP 09/10 how they earned that one multiplayer trophy. 

[CelestialRequiem]

12 hours ago, Baranov_925 said:

Unskippable cutscenes

Yeah, this is a big one for me. 

 

I skip cutscenes in most games even with my initial playthrough, as I don't care for stories in games beyond a very particular amount of outliers. 

[Jelly Soup]

Holy balls, that last page. That went off the rails pretty quickly.

 

I've said this before, but it really bugs me when games with a high number of collectables don't include a damn checklist of some kind. I referenceable list, even a simple one like a damn notepad list. A counter would be nice too. There is no excuse for a simple quality of life addition to not be there from the start.

[HamiTosh]

For me the 7 deadly in sins in gaming are:

 

1) Online Trophies

2) Lootboxes "Micro"transaction

3) Missable trophies combined with not being able to save at any point in order to be able to go back to bag in the trophy

4) Unfinished games, where the game needs a massive D1 Patch. Some people argue that mostly no one will play that game in 10 years, well i got many ps3 games i would still play today, thanks they function without massive patches

5) Pay-to-win, gaming should be a way to be disconnected from real world where everyone starts from 0 with the same circumstances, buying oneself advantages is nothing what should be in a game

6) Making games overly grindy, nerfing any decent way of obtaining currency/rewards while not fixing or expanding the game itself

7) Forced fee to be able to play online

Edited April 19, 2022 by HamiTosh
typo

[Dauersack]

On 16.4.2022 at 4:07 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

A big pet peeve of mine, is when I see people saying a trophy "Requires X no. of people to boost".

 

No. It. Doesn't.

 

There has never been a trophy-  in the whole history of the trophy system - that was designed to "require" people to boost.

They are all achievable naturally, if you play the game enough, and at a time when others are doing so too.

 

What they actually mean is "I missed the window of opportunity by waiting years to try"  or "I'm just not good enough" ...  "so I want people to hand the trophy to me."

I disagree. You are right in most of the cases, as most games usually give a player enough time to complete all the online trophies, even needlessly grindy ones, but not all of them actually do, at least not for everyone. There have been rare cases of games like The Culling 2, a battle royale which was only online for a few days before shutting down, with player numbers so abysmal that completing it naturally was unthinkable, making boosting necessary for people who work full time.

 

Also it depends on how many of such games someone plays, I know a few poor bastards who seemingly made it their goals to complete as many online games as possible before they shut down and become forever unavailable, you would not believe how efficient they sometimes have to be in order to complete some of the games they are going for since they obviously can't start every game at day 1 of the launch. People who do not have the majority of their time available to play games, and are trying to somewhat keep up with several online games, or just joined late due to other committments have to be efficient about things and use boosting in some cases, obviously not for games that are online for half a decade or longer, there is no excuse for that, simply can't finish all of these games naturally.

That is not even touching on games that have ball crushingly difficult online games, like some fighting games do, or the infamous Elder Scrolls online one, that are simply beyond one mans abilities to ever earn naturally. As I said, you are generally correct for the majority of games, but your statement is ignoring these aforementioned factors alltogether and leaves no room for exceptions which definitely exist to quite a few players. What the developers intent was is not really of any consequences there since they clearly missed the mark for some players even if they wanted it to be doable naturally without the need for boosting.

 

 

For the Topic of the thread. Some pet peeves I have with games, pretty much everything that is quite obviously designed to needlessly waste my time. What do I mean with needlessly wasted time? Something that was designed to needlessly prolong certain things, or things that lead to a loss of progress for the objective of getting a trophy, or games that were designed to force unnecessary bad repetition upon a player to pad the playing time.

 

Example 1, prolonging. Some known Offenders: Outlast 2, Wolfenstein 2. The platinum for both of these games requires a no death run on the hardest difficulty. Despite having seen the games several times by the point one attempts either of these no death runs, one has to watch all the games long cutscenes over and over again with no way to skip them, needlessly prolonging each attempt for absolutely no reason other than developer laziness or malicious intent.

 

Example 2, loss of progress. Known Offenders: Countless, basically any game with long no death runs, speedruns or condition runs, as well as easily missable trophies or buggy trophies that require new playthoughs after bugging out. The frustrating realization that you just lost hours of progress due to dying 3 hours deep into a no death run, missing that one tiny collectible among 100+ collectibles in a game with no backtracking, or one of the known bugged trophies not unlocking and therefore voiding it for this playthrough is enraging like few other things in gaming could ever hope to be. I daresay that it is comparable to savegame corruption, but it is actually worse since no developer intentionally implements savegame corruption, two of the things I mentioned here are implemented on purpose though, while the third may be accidental but is rarely ever fixed, unlike savegame corruption, which is at least treated like a big deal by anyone except maybe the scummiest of developers.

 

Example 3, needless repetition. Some known offenders: Souls games. This may sound like I mean farming/grinding, but I actually don't since that at least has a good reason. In farming/grinding, you play the game and all the while you steadily get closer to an objective, one might argue that there is too much of it in some games, but the concepts themselves are good. What I mean is needless padding that can't actually be considered playing the game normally, is entirely preventable but was done intentionally by the developers, usually to pad the gamers average playing time. I still remember running from some of the bonfires back to some of the bosses after each death in Dark Souls, several minutes each time, trying to dodge all the small fry enemies on the way, only to get another chance at the boss. The marathon walk did not help me get any closer to beating the boss, it only delayed the next attempt, it frustrated me more than the bosses themselves. Killing the small enemies was giving me neither useful practice for the bosses nor enough experience to level up and get better stats for the fight, nor any rare and useful drops that would have made the fight easier, it was just a way to add several minutes of padding between each of the many boss attempts required to figure out a boss, and something I have repeatedly called out as horrendous design to a ravenous crowd of souls game fanboys.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Dauersack

[JohnCenaSong-]

1 hour ago, Dauersack said:

Some pet peeves I have with games, pretty much everything that is quite obviously designed to needlessly waste my time. What do I mean with needlessly wasted time? Something that was designed to needlessly prolong certain things, or things that lead to a loss of progress for the objective of getting a trophy, or games that were designed to force unnecessary bad repetition upon a player to pad the playing time.

1000% this general idea.

 

Nothing turns me off more than a game that doesn't respect my time. 

 

I know some people love to debate if they got value for money with a title using some kind of $/hr formula but for me it doesn't consider if half those hours were worthwhile and I'd rather play through 3 hours of the best game I've ever played than 100 hours of mediocre filler content with that 3 hours of amazing content snuggled in there... somewhere...

 

Value for your time is something I consider a factor. Maybe it's just an age thing as younger gamers typically have less disposable income or only get games if their parents buy it for them yet have plenty of free time meanwhile us older folks can buy our own games and don't get enough time to sit down and play them .

 

I just feel if a games wasting my time that's a worse offender than being 'too short', because then I've wasted time and money trying to get very little out of it. You don't get this time back y'know.

 

Cutscenes should always be skippable once you've played the game. Sure, I may want to rewatch the story as I replay a harder mode or NG+ but that should be up to me. Cutscenes can make up a fairly large amount of time as can be seen in YouTube videos that compile them all together. I haven't played Wolfenstein 2 yet but I have played Outlast 2 and whilst that's obviously an easy game since its a walking/ocasionally running away sim you can slip up somewhere silly in a fairly lengthy run and having to sit through unskippable cutscenes again any time you slip up is a drag. Especially if it's a long opening scene. What makes Outlast 2 particularly annoying is, because of its genre, the cutscenes aren't the only thing that feel time wasting on subsequent playthroughs. Hiding while bad guys show up and waiting for them to go through their dialogue and go away before you can move on. Walking slowly through areas that add story first time around but act as basically just cutscenes you have to hold forward on the stick for . The amount of 'danger'/actual 'gameplay' in a run of Outlast 2 is not a lot for its runtime and it's why you see Outlast 1 get replayed to this day and not Outlast 2. It doesn't offer as much despite a longer runtime and so people rather spend their time playing the first game again.

 

Another time waster, quick travel should be unlocked early or by default in open worlds. Visiting a new location for the first time you'll get that journey that may be important to the story/atmosphere but after a while the running back and forth becomes needless filler and you're treading the same ground and basically spending half the game just holding whatever buttons moves you forwards whether that be just forward on the stick or pressing an accelerator for a vehicle etc. In a movie or TV show a lot of the getting A to B is skipped, same happens in linear games when the levels over the cutscene transitions to the next level/environment of gameplay but no... open world games you have to walk that journey no one's actually interested in and maybe get some filler dialogue through a phone call or something that recaps everything that just happened in the last cutscenes . If I had to make a weird comparison it's like watching a documentary versus watching all the hours upon hours of raw footage that may have made up the documentary (often they don't stop recording in downtime just in case something happens). I don't need to see you driving a couple hours on the motorway to visit some professor, show me the 'were on our way to visit blah blah' clip you recorded in the car then suddenly wow you're knocking at the front door saying hello. Editing, it's like magic, we cut the useless stuff out. Games suddenly want to fill it up with that stuff . It doesn't add to the experience seeing, say, Aloy running towards every quest and side quest all across the same map. Oh, hi again robot dinosaur that spawns on this part of the map, I saw you the last 4 times I ran through this valley. Thrilling content. And that's a DECENT open world game, imagine being stuck in a Ubisoft game with no quick travel.

 

Being gated off content through arbitrary XP or RNG factors is another one. Can't progress until you obtain a specific item or reach a specific level. And I'm not even talking RPGs which is what you'd assume. I've seen it in high score level based games, think games like maybe Trials etc. and it's not even a case of 'reach a certain score to move on', no no no, reaching certain levels or currency and geting XP or credits for finishing levels regardless of score so even if you've already mastered the level you're on (you could somehow even be #1 on the leaderboards) you still can't move on until you play it a few more times... What purpose does that serve? The RNG one is worse, where games essentially make the next level/world unlock by RNG because after finishing a level you may get rewards like cosmetics etc. and one of the rewards could be... a key to the next set of levels. I've seen that a couple times before. What if you just keep getting cosmetics over and over? I want to see the 2nd world of the game .

 

And yknow what, speaking of XP gating though. RPGs that force grind. In some RPGs grinding helps but as speedrunners often show you can easily do things under-levelled if you've got the right strategy. Skill and strategy can overcome many fights and bosses following a natural level curve. But some RPGs don't seem to like that and create scenarios where you cannot plausibly win unless you are at least 'x' level. Usually through a system where level difference cripples the effectiveness of your stats and moves. Maybe every level lower than you are than your opponent reduces your damage output and resistances by 10x. Just merely getting that 1 level to make you equal makes the fight play as intended but... doing all story content and side quests up to that point puts you 5 levels under where you need to be

 

I used to play (*cough* be addicted to) MMOs in my younger years, I've seen a LOT of my time wasted in my life and I wish I could get it back. Spending minutes tanking an entire enemy spawn to AoE and gain 0.01% XP towards a level up, doing that mindless repetitive action for a couple hours to get 1% closer to finally hitting that level cap  I try not to let myself get hooked into time wasting content anymore. I see younger gamers getting suckered into these time wasting FOMO content of live services today just like I did with MMOs, it's a rite of passage lol. Gotta spend an hour each day doing the dailies, repetitive content you've done every day that gives you useless junk you've never used because... well... you need to do the daily right? Oh and don't forget to finish the weekly and grind out the pass. Did you enioy any of it? No. Did you spend like 40 hours in the week doing video game chores? Yes. I often hear younger friends of mine groan in PS parties, like actively groan and say "eurgh, I've still got the daily to do". No you don't! It's not a job! Just don't bother with it

 

Games shouldn't feel like work.

Challenging? Yeah, that's cool, overcoming difficulty and getting fulfilment from doing so can be pretty great but that's the only kind of 'work' that I feel has any valid payoff.

All the other stuff that makes games feel like work? No thanks.

 

Respect my time vidyagames and you might keep my attention, k.

[WestRFall]

I would say forced stealth sections when the game isn't made for stealth. Hate it when a game that has a focus on action suddenly makes you be sneaky for plot reasons or whatever.

[Raidou Kuzunoha XIV]

Haven't read the other responses so I may be repeating a few notorious ones, but my personal pet peeves are:

 

• Games that don't respect your time. Less of an issue nowadays, but there's a lot of 6th gen and older games (particularly JRPGs) that have sparse save points, which could result in hours of progress being lost if you get unlucky and fall to a random enemy, or encounter a boss and surprise, surprise, the last save point was an hour or so ago. Better not die! That's not even getting into unnecessary backtracking, fetch quests, games that don't let you skip cutscenes/dialogue, etc.

 

• This kinda goes hand in hand with "games not respecting your time", but I detest trophies that have you doing stupid pointless shit like leaving the game running for 100 hours when it's a 2 hour long game (looking at you, Panzer Dragoon remake), do X random pointless BS for X amount of times for no fucking reason, obtain X thing that is completely pointless in-game and it requires tons of grinding and lucky RNG, etc. The 1001 Jackalopes trophy in Deponia Doomsday really made extremely jaded towards these kinda trophies, to the point where I won't bother for plats in games that have trophies like that now, unless I REALLY enjoy it otherwise.

 

• Games with unskippable tutorials. The extent to which this annoys me depends on the game. With most of 'em, I can deal. I usually appreciate tutorials if it's a game or game series I've never played before anyway. But one thing I can not forgive, are the games that have tutorials that hand control over to you, but if you fail, you have to keep repeating it, over, and over, and over, and over. Most recent game that comes to mind that had me do this was Chocobo GP, that decided to restart the whole bleeding tutorial because I messed up and drifted onto some grass. Thankfully it was pretty short anyway, and it only took me 3 attempts, but Jesus Christ I'd appreciate it if you just let me learn from my mistakes, game, instead of being "oops, you're a complete failure because you goofed on this one itty bitty thing, time to START THIS ALL OVER AGAIN FROM SQUARE ONE!"

 

• Sections in games that feel out of place for the type of game it is. For example, (extremely minor spoilers for a few games)
  Spoiler

  the weird rhythm sections in Secret Agent Clank, the visual novel sections in Nier, Brutal Legend and its RTS tower defence absurdity, etc.

  I don't want to be playing an action heavy game like Bayonetta or something, and then suddenly have to do nothing but read for 30 minutes, to give a crude example. If I wanted to read, I'd go play a visual novel or text adventure game instead, I don't want to play a game in one genre and then get forced to play something completely different while in the midst of it. Sometimes I don't really mind it and it can weirdly enhance the experience (I think Kirby Superstar and It Takes Two did really good jobs of mashing up genres, for example, but that's also kind of their shtick), but a lot of the time, it just hurts the flow and pacing of the game, doesn't feel necessary, and can be irritating to slog through.

 

• Games that have collectibles that have no in-game tracker for said collectibles, so you have no way of knowing what you've already obtained and missed, other than backtracking to areas where collectibles are meant to be according to guides.

 

• This is not a common one at all, but games where you can basically "fail", but the game doesn't reset the level/area automatically when you do so, or even tell you when you've screwed up and won't be able to complete the level without restarting. Blinx the Time Sweeper is an infamous example of mine, I loathe that game with every fibre of my being.

 

• Finally, and this is a minor one, but one that still kinda annoys me, is games that don't have an in-game timer for how long you've been playing. However, what's worse is when a game DOES have a timer, but it doesn't pause, no matter what, so even if you go take a dump, have to suddenly prevent the cat from killing itself because they're a dumbass and are trying to climb a lampshade, or go have dinner and leave the game running, it still counts your time played. Games that have a progress timer, AND pause it when you pause the game, are a Godsend to me.

[Phlegeth]

Lack of manual save.  Quit to title screen *WARNING ALL UNSAVED DATA WILL BE LOST*  Then let me save and quit.  Instead, I gotta run around and do something to try and flag down the autosave.

[Yukiko Miyamoto]

Trophies that require you to buy with real money something in the game to earn, long intros, unskippable cutscenes and RNG based trophies

Edited October 23, 2023 by Kimura Takahashi