Ever get that feeling? You're playing a game. All is going well. You're trouncing the enemy infantry/hostile aliens/gigantic fantasy dragons/eldritch abominations and having a grand time when suddenly... RAGE.
"WTF?!" you say, veins popping on your forehead, "What the hell is this?! NOT THIS AGAIN! ARGH!" (throwing of controllers or computer peripherals optional)

That's right, it's your least favourite game trope and it's popped up once more to ruin your gaming experience. So now's your chance to share!
What's the one gaming aspect/trope that really gets your goat? Maybe you have several?


For me, there's two that really take the cake:
(WARNING, INCOMING WALL O' TEXT. Skip to the bolded TL;DR sections if you can't be bothered.)

ONE: THE BATTLE THAT DIDN'T MATTER

^This guy is quite possibly the best example I can think of in recent times. Kai Leng from Mass Effect 3. If you haven't played the game, then I'll tell you that he's portrayed as a stereotypical omnipotent ninja warrior who will seriously screw you over at any possible moment with unbelievable skill with a katana and can escape any situation without any hassle. The key word here is portayed.
Inside cutscenes this guy is an absolute beast, constantly getting in the way and ruining your plans to save the galaxy in a heartbeat. In actual gameplay? Not so much.
He's incredibly easy to beat the few times you do actually fight with him. "What's his swordplay matter if I can just blast him from a distance with biotics or firearms?" I said to myself, and this proved to be true. You could pretty much position a knee-high couch between you and him and just chip away at his health with bullets and biotics until the inevitable cutscene kicked in - and that's where things get silly.
Firstly, during the cutscene he'll gain magical ninja powers from nowhere. Secondly, he'll fuck up whatever shit you were trying to do despite obviously having his ass kicked. And then he'll boast about how awesome he is and flee with the current plot coupon.

This kind of segregation between actual gameplay and the story really gets to me, as it kind of defeats the entire feeling of, well, whipping his ass. It really just feels cheap and poorly executed in the end. For lack of a better word, it feels like bullshit.
There are many other games that pull this, and sometimes it's acceptable (like say, if the boss was just toying with you all along *cough*DevilMayCry*cough*) but most of the time it just doesn't feel right.

TL;DR: You beat the big nasty boss with ease, and a cutscene pops up in which he acts like he's gotten bored of fighting with you, and then promptly smashes your ass/boasts about how good he is and then leaves like nothing ever happened.

IMO:
Bad Example: MASS EFFECT 3: Kai Leng (as mentioned above)
Good Example: DEVIL MAY CRY 4: Battles with Dante (since he's in-character by just toying with you - he doesn't really want you dead but won't let you think you're better than him anyway)

TWO: (most) QUICKTIME EVENTS

This is similar to the example above, but possibly worse in my opinion. Once again, you've beaten the massive Eldritch Abomination although it was significantly harder than the bullshit cutscene magic power boss in the above example. The cutscene detailing the boss's long, dramatic death starts playing. You relax, set the controller aside for a moment - after a hard-fought battle you can finally take a break right?
"WRONG! YOU'RE STILL PLAYING DUDE! NOW MASH THE RIGHT AND LEFT TRIGG- aww shiiiiiit you dun mash them in time. Now you gun' have to fight that there big beastie all over again! LOL!!1!1"

That's right. You're going to have to fight the gigantic bonus boss monster all over again because you didn't push the trigger buttons fast enough. Worse yet you might have to start the level all over again.
This really gets to me. Surely having fought so hard inside actual gameplay and having whittled down the big guy's health to nothing should mean you've beaten him, yes? This is when it starts to piss me off. The result of a boss battle should never come down to whether you can press the dodge button fast enough - that's what the whole gameplay segment was for, right?
Sometimes it's not even a boss monster that kills you. As in the picture above, you can laboriously blast your way through the unstoppable legions of mutants and zombies and generally be a complete badass to get this far, but if you can't mash some buttons fast enough or press them at the right time, you're dead.
Again I feel this just detracts from the whole feel of the game and makes the death feel cheap and unfair.

There are times where quicktime events are done well however - I approve of their use for canned finishers р la God of War's normal enemies where they're (usually) not required to put an enemy down for good, or when they're used in, say, a boss fight to avoid or reduce damage (rather than avoiding instant death р la Resident Evil) like what can be found in Yakuza or Kingdom Hearts. I even don't mind their use as the aforementioned "Press X to Not Die Boss Finisher" in Bayonetta - but only because you can restart from mid-event or mid-battle rather than having to fight the whole boss battle again or worse the entire stage all over again.
It's just when it boils down to "all you've done so far amounts to nothing if you don't PRESS THIS BUTTON RIGHT NOW!" that I get frustrated.

Still confused? IMO:
Bad example: BATTLEFIELD 3: The quicktime event in which failing a button press against a rat means you yelp out in pain and get blasted to death by insurgents.
Good example: YAKUZA 4: Quicktime event to reduce/avoid damage from a boss's attack - but failure isn't instant death.

TL;DR: I don't like it when having a slow reaction to a button prompt can flush all your efforts up till now down the toilet and force you to start again. However I don't mind when missing a prompt doesn't mean instant death or is just used for flashy finishers etc. without actually being required.


So then, what is it that gets your goat?
Is it having save points instead of quicksaves whenever you choose?
Is it the constant, grinding angst one of your RPG team members always seems to have?
Is it that you can't jump over a knee high fence?
Maybe it's being forced to have access to the god damned internet to play single-player?
Don't be shy, step forward and tell us all!


(As you may have noticed by my links, I'm quite partial to TV Tropes. It's a great place to go to in order to identify the positive and negative -well- tropes your game might have. Tropes, shortly put, are common aspects things in media might share. Like a clichщ without the negative connotations. I guess.)

Starcraft II

Oh, ok, conventional Protoss, sounds good, let's have a straight up game... OH WTF FUCK PROXY GATEWAYS IN TO PROXY VOIDS YOU KIDDING ME? THE FUCK FUCK YOUR DTS. OH OK 1 BASE CARRIERS.

Even the best players lose to Protoss bullshit.

Zerg conventional macro will lose to Protoss bs because you can never tell if your opponent is an idiot or an asshole.

That said, I'm on a season-long winning streak.

But if I lose to some bs proxy 2gate...

terran is more imbalanced than protoss. If you get detection and scout what the protoss is doing in and around his base you can determine what he is going to do (how he is going to cheese, rather). besides, once you get to the higher leagues the stupid cheesing stops.

I've watched streams of CatZ or Destiny loosing to protoss cheese.

Besides that, once protoss learn that "oh I can just FFE 2base and push a 200/200 ball and be unstoppable if I'm not a retard" (90% of GSL games durr)

Terrans play sloppy and just rely on their imba units so they are an easy win for me. Any toss with half decent micro will win every game without trouble.

I'm top 10 plat, I guess you are diamond then?

What do you play? Zerg? Zerg can max before 13:00 and then be at 200/200 again by the time their army dies if you know how to micro profficiently. Zerg is incredibly imbalanced in that sense. Since they can remax their armies so quickly, It shouldnt be too hard to kill a 200/200 ball

Don't say that terrans play sloppy because they are terran, that isnt a fair statement. Yes, a lot of people rely on their imbalanced units and it can get super cheesey. protoss doesnt have to micro outside of using ff and sometimes blink, outside of occasionally having to reposition their colos

no i'm not diamond im just not silly.

edit: to remain relevant to this thread, blizzard making a game that is poorly balanced really gets my goat.

Zerg usually max around 11 minute, but the protoss can easily just slice your army in half, kill it and not loose more than a handful of stuff. Sure conventional zerg requires 50% more economy than your opponent, but that is because zerg units are less cost effective than any other race. Protoss have the most cost effective units in terms of survivablity, Terran in terms of DPS. It's not uncommon for a 100 zerg army to smash against a 50 protoss army and be forced to pull out because of how easily protoss can res-position and block, or to be wiped out entirely. To remain economically we need to deal 1 food damage for every 2 food of ours, which is just not realistic in that situation.

You will find that zerg usually make very uneconomical attacks just to put pressure on. Take for example defense of the 11 min roach timing push. All toss needs to do is drop forcefields and blast the roaches using positioning and superior ranged attacks. 5 sentries and 2 coli can clean up a 130 food roach army fairly easily with half-decent micro.

Plus, protoss can reinforce faster than zerg can, just by using warpgates. It always amazes me that protoss don't just use prisms, but instead walk around building proxy pylons. They feed me free kills because they don't want to use a prism? Crazy.

Terrans almost always play sloppy. Just MMM and roll 50% of the time. Probably the other 50% is a blind hellion rush opener, which is why I open roaches against blind.

Protoss not needing micro is definitely broken. Why should a protoss player be able to attack move their army then only control their sentries? Protoss play is so easy, attack move army, select sentries, wait till you engage, FF half enemy army away, then blink any stalker that is on yellow health to the back of your army. Wow gg. Zerg has just pure macro - for which we have to micro to achieve! Our economy and production requires micro! Plus we have an extra resource to manage and we don't have amazing abilities like FF, blink, seeker missile, storm, feedback, etc. You know what Zerg get? Fungal growth: 30 damage over 4 seconds vs psi storm 112 damage over 7 seconds vs seeker 100 damage. As for point target, protoss get feedback which can instakill other casters, terran get snipe which can instakill other casters, and zerg gets neural parasite which you can use to kill a caster if you manage to grab it and move it within range of your units and attack it normally... Gah, ridiculous!

If a protoss plays like a zerg (play conservative, lots of scouting, heavy economy to 70), then it's GG for the zerg. If zerg goes over 70 they won't be strong enough to fight the ball, if they go less then they won't be able to sustain the reinforcement stream. Protoss can 1 base, 2 base, 3 base because their units are each very food efficient and very strong, so they last a long time and even with a 100 food army they can beat 200 food of zerg.

Sure, you may say "it's imba that zerg can reinforce fast" but realize that protoss can reinforce faster, and terran can reinforce on a larger macro scale - both without the same micro required by zerg. Plus both can do it constantly, zerg will run out of saved larvae after just 1 wave...

basically what gets my goat would be pay2win games. richer players would win easily by buying armour or OP weapons and beat out the rest of the players. also, i was playing armored core where the last mission requires you to kill a boss which is oveeppwered, even my best mech could not beat it. there are also some games where some features are only available to the AI which would give an advantage to the computer and prevents you from winning

Or grind to win games

> Killing Floor
> Level 6 sharpshooter requires 9000 headshots
> Have to spend 8 hours just shooting people's heads which requires no effort
> Level 6 gives +140% headshot damage

Shit ton of grinding just to get passive damage bonuses...

Games where, no matter how good you are, what ultimately dictates the game is stats. I HATE it when I'm playing a game, and I have the knowledge and experience to play well, but I'll lose because I'm not a hardcore stats type of player. I like FPS games for that very reason, it's not about the stats of the gun, it's about the aim of the user.

The era of heavy stats based games is long since gone, but I can induce a day of rage by picking one of them up.

Oh god morrowind made me so angry the first couple hours of playing through it because everytime you try to hit something your sword just goes right through it unless you have good stats. Good times. :'D