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[Biowraith]

Straight upgrades in multiplayer games
(I'm DLing FireFall atm, I might as well give it a shot, I watched a few videos, but is it like that?)

I've not PvP'd in Firefall recently but from what I understand, while you can upgrade to better gear in PvE, it doesn't carry over to PvP - everyone gets equipped with a default set of gear in PvP. 

The only potential exception would be that you have to unlock battleframes and while I'm pretty sure it segregates matches between tier 1 and tier 2 frames, it may be that within a given tier one frame is better suited to PvP than another (like how in some games rogues are better for PvP than mages, or vice versa).

[nenjin]

Overly-overt and/or either arbitarily restrictive (you cant use a mace at all because you havent learnt how to) or overly unrestricted (you spend 10 hours bashing wolves to death with a club, and upgrade your magic/smithing somehow) progression systems
In Strawman-Quest, you "level up". Which is not only annoying in itself (for me , I would prefer something less "step-like" and smoother), but they then shove it in your face with crazy over-the-top particle and sound effects, with "LEVEL UP" printed above the character in the 3d world for good measure. Just to make damn sure you realised you leveled up. Did I mention you just leveled up? Yeah, you just leveled up.

I'll take overly restrictive over completely unrestricted any day. While overly restrictive systems are a grind, at least they have some context, some rational cause and effect simulation. 3d RPGs that do experience pool spending drive me fucking insane. Yes, it solves the grind. It's also a mechanic much better suited to a smaller, more abstract game that isn't apeing realism. If I can swing a sword in 3d, cook a fish in an actual campfire, and cast actual spells, make my experience gain relevant to what I do. Otherwise the only thing that doesn't feel arbitrary is your experience pool; it's the only frame of reference that really matters. Is casting spells hard? Not when you can bash things in the face to learn it! Does combat take actual skill and practice at low levels? Not when you can cook 3,000 fish! I think Bethesda games have become the worst about this. Morrowind and Oblivion were honest to god attempts at doing the learn-as-you-do thing....and then Bethesda just decided there were easier and more cost-effective ways to make their games.

Pre-rendered Cutscenes

In their defense, it's work that can be outsourced. It's not a programmer sitting there scripting action for a 30 second video that is worth less than actual gameplay. In-engine cut scenes take a lot of additional work, from a good animator, to be worth it too. If you've got an isometric game and then need to render a cutscene at basically the FPS level, there's a lot of nuance and tweaking and work that would go into 30 seconds of footage that wouldn't be required for simply scripting some action.

But I more or less agree. The reason pre-rendered cutscenes still exist is because many game designers either want or are asked to emulate Hollywood. It's a director's prerogative to say "no, people have to see this scene in just the right way for them to really "get it."" And I do occasionally feel bad when something dramatic and highly visual is put in game for narrative purposes and I....am admiring the texture work on a wall or something. I reminded of BL2 when:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sanctuary takes off

And you're locked in the area until every last moment of that scene has played out. It's a pretty big spectacle, but on replaying I was left thinking "Man, some game director really just couldn't let this go. "No!", he cried. "They have to watch it all!""

My gripe...

Menus that can't decide whether your mouse or your keys are dominant.

I'm looking DIRECTLY at you Borderlands 2. Holy fuck, the menus can be so annoying. And it's the total lack of consistency in behavior that is the most frustrating. Change tabs too fast? Well, now your arrow keys are subservient to the position of your mouse on the screen. Next time? Now the mouse is stuck on the same box and won't move it to save its life. I don't understand how this is a problem in this day and age....I didn't realize how this had never really been an issue before until I started playing BL2.

[alexandertnt]

Dragons as antagonists

This.
Unless the villain dragon is really badass.

I dont like them being antagonists at all

Could your particular pet peeve be generalised to "Big bads that are not big or bad?"

While overly restrictive systems are a grind, at least they have some context, some rational cause and effect simulation

I was referring to games with arbitary restrictions. So you can't even hold a mace in your hands at all because the RPG rules decide it to be so for no rational reason. I have never used a mace before, but if someone gave me one I have no doubt I could flail it around clumsily at a target. I agree with the rest of what you said about EXP systems (they annoy the hell out of me).

I also think if you make the rest of the game interesting and varied, you can help reduce any feeling of grind.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Dragons as antagonists

This.
Unless the villain dragon is really badass.

I dont like them being antagonists at all

I really need to get back to working on my game...

[SealyStar]

Devs whoring out to MLGs
Closely related to the "right way to play" problem. Basically, when developers listen to a small fraction of dedicated fans and change the game as much as necessary to please them. Starcraft II is a great example of this: there's got to be at least a dozen good-looking units or abilities in the original plans for the game that were disincluded because they caused some minor problem to the preconceived strategies of the Korean MLGs who decide what Starcraft II should be. Thank God for the campaign (and the map editor), where they could add fun shit - and not particularly unbalanced either - without having the South Korean 마스터 레이스 whine about it. Bla bla competitive balance bla bla major league gaming bla bla, but seriously, most of the stuff removed was perfectly "balanced" in objective terms, but not "균형이 잡힌".

Guns using ammo they shouldn't, or not using ammo they should
It's stupid when games go to the length of having different bullet types, but disregard differences between those bullets and assume that you can chuck a .50 BMG in a Desert Eagle and expect that to work. More commonly, though, it's the inverse problem, where a gun should share ammo X with a different gun but for gameplay reasons uses ammo Y. In all the WWII-era CoDs (I have never played the modern-era ones), this was a huge pain in the ass. I guess there must have been some technical issue with two guns sharing ammo, because a fucking scoped rifle used different ammo than the same rifle without a scope. Seriously.

Guns with stupid limits on how much ammo can be carried
Okay, so we all recognize that it's *unrealistic* to have fifty magazines per firearm on your person at any given time, or to be able to reload in the middle of a fight and transfer all unused rounds to the new magazine. But realism sucks. Beyond this, there are times when ammo storage limits just get moronic. Half-Life 2, in their quest to be as unrealistic as possible (which isn't always bad), lets you carry, for instance, six magazines' worth of SMG bullets, but only three (much smaller) magazines of Magnum rounds. Half-Life (1) has another problem with the shotgun: it is the only gun in the game where, for no apparent reason, the maximum ammunition supply you can hold is not a multiple of the number of bullets in the gun (125 vs . It's a minor problem, and God knows when you'll have a full supply anyway, but it just bugs me.

Players who complain about perfectly good strategies and tactics on the grounds that they are "cheating"
This is on the player's side, not the developers, but the point stands. Essentially, this is just the form the first problem takes when the whiny players are (thank God) unable to sway the devs. The textbook example is "camping" in every FPS. First, "camping" isn't cheating. Second, "camping" is, in real life, a useful tactic for holding ground, just like in FPSes. Third, there is nothing stopping the whining player from "camping" too. Another example is RTS builds that piss people off. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same "overpowered" "cheese" tactics that I am.

Oh, and speaking off typing, I type with my left ring, middle, and index fingers on ASD and my left pinkie just sits there (I hit LShift with my ring finger, too); this covers all the way to B, H, and Y, and I just "peck" with my right hand to cover the keys to the right of that. I do 60-some WPM this way. Fuck ASDF-JKL;. Who the hell uses the semicolon that much anyway?

[itisnotlogical]

Levels that waaaay, waaaaaaaay overstay their welcome

I just got Half Life 2 for Xbox earlier today. It's my first time playing the game, and I've probably spent more time in Water Hazard than I have in all of the opening levels combined. It's a neat idea, but couldn't they have cut some of it? I've gone through about three or four points that would be a logical and satisfying conclusion to the level, but it just keeps going.

Powerful-looking weapons that hardly do any damage and Fragile-looking things that are invincible

Half Life 2 again. The missiles that the APCs fire look really damn threatening, especially since my airboat could probably be taken out with a strong shove. But the missiles only do 5 damage on glancing hits (which most of them are, since you're moving) and the airboat can somehow survive an infinite barrage of missiles. It would be really satisfying to see the entire contraption fly into a million pieces after a missile strikes the engine, but it stubbornly floats on ahead of me after I die.

[Darkmere]

The airboat is by far the shittiest part of HL2. Everything else in the game is much, MUCH better. Just some friendly encouragement, I played it through for the first time a couple months ago and once I got past the part the game was great.

[itisnotlogical]

I've already made it past the airboat and now I'm in Ravenholm. Dear Lord what a shift. Probably my new favorite level in all of videogames.

But yeah, every amazing game has it's crap parts, even Perfect Dark (my personal GOTYAY). But I've already cluttered up the "How did you last die?" thread with enough talk about Perfect Dark to last the rest of this forum's lifetime

[Lightningfalcon]

The airboat is by far the shittiest part of HL2. Everything else in the game is much, MUCH better. Just some friendly encouragement, I played it through for the first time a couple months ago and once I got past the part the game was great.

What?  I remember buying the game on steam last Christmas, and thinking that this was a rather average game until I got to that point.  I distinctly remember running around in the boat gunning stuff down and thinking to myself "I change my mind.   This game IS awesome." Now the car, on the other hand...

[Darkmere]

The airboat is by far the shittiest part of HL2. Everything else in the game is much, MUCH better. Just some friendly encouragement, I played it through for the first time a couple months ago and once I got past the part the game was great.

What?  I remember buying the game on steam last Christmas, and thinking that this was a rather average game until I got to that point.  I distinctly remember running around in the boat gunning stuff down and thinking to myself "I change my mind.   This game IS awesome." Now the car, on the other hand...

(YMMV)
I actually used the boat part as a pet peeve in this thread, but a summary of it was, nothing plot-wise happens, most of the time you don't have a gun, and the terrain is pretty unforgiving with the fiddly controls. I actually liked the buggy part much better as it was broken up with more on-foot segments and there weren't any jumps that required me to do a long loop if I missed. Oh and right after it you get the thingy with all the other thingies that you use in the place that time, which I actually enjoyed almost as much as ravenholm. Yes, I'm being vague in case itisnotlogical isn't there yet.

I'm talking about

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Nova Prospekt

[Virtz]

Players who complain about perfectly good strategies and tactics on the grounds that they are "cheating"
This is on the player's side, not the developers, but the point stands. Essentially, this is just the form the first problem takes when the whiny players are (thank God) unable to sway the devs. The textbook example is "camping" in every FPS. First, "camping" isn't cheating. Second, "camping" is, in real life, a useful tactic for holding ground, just like in FPSes. Third, there is nothing stopping the whining player from "camping" too. Another example is RTS builds that piss people off. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same "overpowered" "cheese" tactics that I am.

No. Just no. Games are not real life. You're not fighting for your life and country, you're going in to fight other players on equal ground for fun unless the game mode says otherwise. Assuming a defensive stance is not equal ground, it is higher ground that cannot be occupied by all players on the server at the same time. Hence why you cannot say "if you don't like camping, then camp!", cause if everyone did it, then you'd have a server of bumpkins standing around doing nothing!
Camping is a tactic that makes an otherwise fast and fun game slow and tedious. And I'm pretty sure the whole server will love you for wasting their time in a round-based game.

[Bdthemag]

The "Competitive" Gaming Scene
I don't hating competitive gaming, I just hate the current competitive gaming scene. The non-fighting game competitive scene is entirely based upon three games. Starcraft 2, LoL, and Dota 2. Now these games are arguably fine in their own right, but after a few years of watching them it gets so terribly boring. RTS's and MOBA's are HIGHLY reliant on a preset meta nowadays, and many matches boil down to "See if opponent is X, if so do Y. If not do Z." to the point where very little personal skill is required, and what you really need is good knowledge of the meta. At least competitive FPS's are based more on the skill level and reflexes of the player, but with still a bit of meta involved.

Speaking of competitive games...

Developers who try to force their game to have a competitive scene.
God damn I hate this so much. LoL, Dota 2, and to a lesser extent SC2 is responsible for this along with a countless amount of other new games. The companies throw money at professional players, create big events, and pretty much try to force their game into having a competitive community. I hate this so much, because instead of making their game more balanced or competitive friendly they just bypass this by throwing even MORE money at things.

[Krevsin]

The airboat is by far the shittiest part of HL2. Everything else in the game is much, MUCH better. Just some friendly encouragement, I played it through for the first time a couple months ago and once I got past the part the game was great.

What?  I remember buying the game on steam last Christmas, and thinking that this was a rather average game until I got to that point.  I distinctly remember running around in the boat gunning stuff down and thinking to myself "I change my mind.   This game IS awesome." Now the car, on the other hand...

I actually liked the car part more than I liked the boat part. Why? Well, more exploration that ties incredibly well with interactive storytelling.

There's a segment in the car part where you drive by a house. You can stop there or you can go past it. If you stop,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You find that the house used to be populated by the rebels, and there's a hole in the roof all the way to the basement. At the bottom, there is a headcrab shell. You see the previous tennants rise up from their headcrab-induced slumber and attack you in what might possibly be one of the greatest interactive storytelling moments in the history of videogames.

Do you need long, arbitrary cutscenes or speeches, disgusted shouts of "Oh, god, what did they do to these people" or anything like that? No. You see the scene and you figure out what happened there yourself based entirely on what you've seen beforehand.

It is quite possibly one of my favourite in-game story moments from any game ever.

[BunnyBob77]

I really enjoyed the airboat segmentin half life 2.  The physics are pretty fun the helicopter chase part is really great.  It was actually one of my favorite parts.

[SealyStar]

Developers who try to force their game to have a competitive scene.
God damn I hate this so much. LoL, Dota 2, and to a lesser extent SC2 is responsible for this along with a countless amount of other new games. The companies throw money at professional players, create big events, and pretty much try to force their game into having a competitive community. I hate this so much, because instead of making their game more balanced or competitive friendly they just bypass this by throwing even MORE money at things.

This goes along with my "Devs whoring out to MLGs" complaint. I didn't dwell on it much, though. Well said.