So basically this is a thread to post all the shit that really, really annoys you about games, gaming, game communities and the games industry, be it old grievances or a news article that really pissed you off

I'll start with a few videos from Rich of ReviewTechUSA.

Splatoon will not have voice chat because of "online meanies". It should be obvious why this is a problem, but for those scratching their heads, Splatoon is a 3rd-person shooter. Shooters need some kind of voice chat in order for any kind of teamwork to take place. Sacrificing a core gameplay feature (and a ubiquitous one at that!) in order to preserve some people's delicate feelings is dumb. Exceedingly dumb. Here's to hoping that they go back on that.

In other news, the ESA has decided that modding old games to KEEP THEM FUNCTIONAL is "hacking" and "illegal". So according to these morons I performed a serious breach of copyright laws by installing mods to make Fallout 3 work on my computer, and anyone who does anything to fix games that relied on GFWL is also breaking the law.

So what gets your goats?

Squigsquasher wrote:In other news, the ESA has decided that modding old games to KEEP THEM FUNCTIONAL is "hacking" and "illegal". So according to these morons I performed a serious breach of copyright laws by installing mods to make Fallout 3 work on my computer, and anyone who does anything to fix games that relied on GFWL is also breaking the law.

They can take my Skyrim mods from my cold sticky hands.

IP law in the computer age is all kinds of messed up - but then it already was, not least because of the repeated changes to keep Mickey Mouse and The Beatles in copyright.

I was just thinking of making a topic like this, great idea.

Anyhow... *Cue Rebel Alliance theme and scrolling yellow text*

-The toxicity of online multiplayer. Name-calling was bad enough, then people had to start calling swat teams on other players. There is something very wrong with modern gaming culture.

-The radical feminist movement in gaming, and the fact that the media is actually taking it seriously.

-Bigots bashing Square-Enix for not having more racially diverse Final Fantasy characters, then turning around and bashing the company again whenever they do add one because 'they made a racist stereotype.' Apparently these people don't realize that ALL JRPG characters are stereotypes to some degree. You want to know why S-E doesn't make more dark-skinned characters? Probably because these people react so negatively whenever they do!

-Companies churning out multiple improved versions of a game within the span of a few years. Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, and Dynasty Warriors are the worst offenders. I don't mind buying something like a true Ultimate or Game of the Year edition, but despite being a huge fan of the DOA series I still haven't bought DOA5 Last Round because it's literally the 5th iteration of DOA5 that has been released in the past 4 years! I already bought DOA5 and DOA5 'Ultimate' (ha-ha) at full price when they were released, and I refuse to pay full price for the same game again regardless of the graphical improvements. The next DOA I buy on release day will be DOA 6 Ultimate, I'm not even going to bother with the first iteration.

-The massive push towards digital copies, especially in PC gaming. This is actually the main obstacle preventing me from getting a gaming PC/console like the Syber Vapor (well, that and Steam dragging their ass with finishing Steam OS). I cannot get anything better than satellite internet where I live, and the data cap is about 25 gigs per month. This wasn't such a huge issue last gen when games were about 8-15 gigs, but now they're 25-50! I am not going to blow one or two months' worth of data to download a single game. Add to that the fact that all of the physically released PC games are Windows or Mac only. I will never use Windows again after replacing my current laptop, and Macs are hideously overpriced. That only leaves Linux and Steam OS. Linux has little or no games, and Steam OS (which is specifically made for gaming) seems to be stuck in development hell in addition to being all-digital! Unless companies decide to print physical copies of their games for Steam OS, it looks like I won't be doing any PC gaming this gen.

-Microsoft's stranglehold on PC gaming in general, as well as what they tried to turn the Xbox One into before public outcry forced them to change course. I own both the original Xbox and Xbox 360, but I will never be giving Microsoft any of my money again if I can help it.

-Sony's obsession with absurdly overpriced proprietary memory cards. $2 or more per gigabyte? Seriously? It's no wonder the Vita and PS TV are struggling in the market. Nobody wants to pay $64 for a 32-gig memory card! You can buy a 500-gig hard drive for that kind of money!

-Nintendo's wacky "innovations." In the past 2 gens they seem to have developed the philosophy of doing something new regardless of whether or not it's actually a good idea. Case in point: the Wii U gamepad. Making a CONTROLLER that reportedly costs $100 to manufacture, has terrible battery life, and is larger than the friggin' console it comes with was really not that great of an idea. Most of its second-screen features could easily be duplicated via a companion app for a tablet (which most people already own and can be used for a lot more than just a second Wii U screen). The Wii's motion controller (which I do own and do have experience with) was not that great of an idea either. It's way too limited for playing most traditional games, and that's WITH the added functionality of the Nunchuk. None of this stopped me from getting a Wii, and it won't stop me from getting a Wii U next year, but Nintendo, there's a reason people are still buying Gamecube controllers to play your new Super Smash Brothers.

Eeey, I really liked the Wii Remote! I played the fuck out of Metroid Prime Trilogy with that thing, adventuring through each game multiple times in style and comfort. I feel like it's the developers who failed the Wii Remote and not the other way around, for not utilizing its potential the way precious few games like MPT did.

No disagreement on the GamePad, though. I like how it feels in my hands as an alternative to the Pro but I have yet to play a game that makes the screen anything more than an expensive battery drainer that you can't even turn off during play. In Wind Waker HD, using the GamePad is actually a hindrance because in order to use the item screen when you pause the game you have to take the trouble to look down at the GamePad instead of the information just appearing right in front of you as happens when you use a Pro instead.

I tell you what, the GamePad should have been Nintendo's answer to the iPad. A gaming device you can whip out on the train to play games on its glorious screen, obviously with only as much horsepower as can be crammed into its shell but given what mobile platforms (including the 3DS itself for that matter) can do nowadays I'd say that's plenty.

...

As for what gets my goat, it should be no surprise given how often I mention it: the incredible shrinking control the consumer has over just about any aspect of the gaming experience, right down to the goddamn controls. The single biggest thing that drove me away from consoles into becoming primarily a PC gamer is how fewer and fewer games let you do even so much as reconfigure your controls. On a PC, I can force the issue whether they like it or not by remapping the controls outside of the game (which is how I was able to slap together an acceptable control scheme for Resident Evil HD Remaster), but I really wish I didn't have to. You're lucky these days for a game to grace you with the choice of a few select presets, when games, including games in the same series that limit you this way now, used to let you assign most functions to any button on the controller. What the hell happened?!

Monk Ed wrote:I feel like it's the developers who failed the Wii Remote and not the other way around, for not utilizing its potential the way precious few games like MPT did.

That's also possible. The biggest problem I had with it was the lack of a second analog for camera control. Two analog sticks should be a basic requirement for all controllers for 3d games IMO.

I tell you what, the GamePad should have been Nintendo's answer to the iPad. A gaming device you can whip out on the train to play games on its glorious screen, obviously with only as much horsepower as can be crammed into its shell but given what mobile platforms (including the 3DS itself for that matter) can do nowadays I'd say that's plenty.

Agreed. Actually that's kind of what I'm hoping the NX turns out to be: a single-screen handheld with a 6"-7" screen and decent processing power (Vita level or better). Of course if it turned out to be a new home console with as much muscle as the PS4/Xbox One I wouldn't complain at all, but knowing modern Nintendo that's even less likely.

IronEvangelion wrote:That's also possible. The biggest problem I had with it was the lack of a second analog for camera control. Two analog sticks should be a basic requirement for all controllers for 3d games IMO.

The second analog stick is a curiously persistent bandaid that was slapped onto what was fundamentally a 2D controller and has stuck ever since because it's the closest the gamepad has ever come to anything approaching the mouse whose speed and accuracy it has been so desperately trying to reproduce by other means ever since it adopted the shooter as a genre. Even disregarding the relative imprecision and slowness of an analog stick as an aiming control, the tacked-on nature of the second analog stick remains evident in the way it forces you to forgo immediate access to about half the controller's functional buttons to use it, resulting in the gradual migration of core functionality away from the face buttons to the shoulder buttons as the right analog stick became steadily more central to gameplay.

And I say this as a gamer who games primarily with gamepads and uses them nearly whenever they're available. I'm just aware that there's considerable room for improvement.

I liked the Wii Remote for being the first console controller to at least try to address the standard dual analog controller's fundamental contradiction, but in the long run it seems that its successes (admittedly few) were forgotten beneath the mountain of cheap shovelware games and games that didn't even try to utilize it effectively. Metroid Prime Trilogy is literally the only game I can name that I thought used the Wii Remote to anything close to its true potential, but even other games with a shooter-based control scheme did not control as well as MPT.

Having said all that I'm ultimately fine with the Wii Remote being remembered as an evolutionary dead end, if only for how its design begged to be used. Its "toyetic" nature encouraged very bad design decisions in the name of "fun" that lost its novelty quickly, as I remember distinctly from my seemingly endless journey through Skyward Sword wishing I could control the sword swings with a damned analog stick instead of the much more effortful arm and wrist flicks demanded by the way they had programmed the Wii Remote. Bad memories of games encouraging me to shake the damn thing including for such simple and common actions as a basic attack leave me thankful to leave it behind in the dustbin of gaming history.

Instead I have my sights set on the Steam controller as the next contender for the true evolution of the gamepad. Most comparisons of the touchpads' effectiveness are made in reference to a mouse, which is a promising comparison for any aspect of a console controller to make, but I worry whether touchpad technology is yet where it needs to be to allow your thumb to work as effectively as a mouse's tracking camera, among other concerns, but at least the controller was designed with the mindset of keeping each digit dedicated to a particular control (most commentary suggests that the analog stick and face buttons on the controller are little more than concessions to the current expectations of gamepad design) instead of the opportunity cost problem that plagues the use of the second analog stick in games today.

The fact that nintendo gets a free pass for pulling some of the shit EA pulls daily, i say this as a nintendo fan but seriously what the fuck.
Especially their youtube policy, even when angryjoe complained about the bullshit nintendo put him through the fanboys started calling him greedy and even rooster teeth got on his case.

Just no.

Toxicity of online multiplayer that IronEvangelion mentioned is something that really, really pisses me off. It's not prevalent in some games in which there isn't a 'reward' for winning: for example, on TF2 I usually go to some nice servers where people just chat casually while shooting rockets and flaming arrows at each other, and if the other team wins then it's a fair cop and we get another go next round anyway. On DoTA 2, however, it's a whole different story; even on unranked matchmaking you can expect to be called a noob and various other insults aimed at your sexuality, gender and race even if your team is winning, simply because you happened to die at a certain point or didn't want to risk your life helping a teammate when they wandered into a trap and got ganked. It's even worse on ranked matchmaking when there are 25 points of MMR on the line and the imaginary significance of this makes you the conquering champions if you win and the scum of the earth if you lose. The other team taunts you a lot as well, so you'll be under verbal assault from both sides. Even if you're playing well, you'll still get insulted for no particular reason if you die or if someone else dies in your vicinity.

Toxicity of online multiplayer

Which is why I do all my Multiplayer with friends I know IRL, and stay away from the modern FPS Genre in general.

Squigsquasher wrote:In other news, the ESA has decided that modding old games to KEEP THEM FUNCTIONAL is "hacking" and "illegal".

... Oh no, tha-Earth & Beyond, it's... oh no, no no no no NO!!! It's an EA Game, you just KNOW they're going to pull this SH*T! The devs there even get donations and hire people on- DAMMMIT!

^Bah, modding Bethesda games is where a lot of the fun comes from. Not to mention that a lot of mods for those games tend to fix glitches or enhance the graphical quality of the games. And some, like the Fate Stay/Night Skyrim mods I am often wont to mention, are very fun.

Ray wrote:Which is why I do all my Multiplayer with friends I know IRL, and stay away from the modern FPS Genre in general.

Stay away from MOBAs as well. Seriously, there's something about trapping 10 people in a virtual arena for an hour that makes men go crazy.

Eieechh, all I can really in good reason object to is Steam's ideal of their privately-owned monopolic lending library of video games, and lesser manifestations of the same tendency. I'm not much of a """""gamer""""" so I can't really comment on anything else.

Intellectual property law in general is utterly insane. I'll obey what older portions of it are in accord with conscience and common sense, but nothing further of laws so utterly unenforceable and unnatural.

Lavinius wrote:Eieechh, all I can really in good reason object to is Steam's ideal of their privately-owned monopolic lending library of video games, and lesser manifestations of the same tendency. I'm not much of a """""gamer""""" so I can't really comment on anything else.

Not so much a lending library as the only bookstore on the mountain, since you keep what you pay for.

That said, for people like me who live in areas where non-digital games procurement is much more expensive than digital downloads, Steam is a godsend. There are also some games on there you'd be starved to find anywhere in the real world, like Morrowind or System Shock 2.

Additionally, the other major developer-run digital PC game stores like Origin are admittedly fairly crappy, to the point that Origin began giving out free games which is how I now have a free Origin copy of Dead Space.

Shinoyami65 wrote:Not so much a lending library as the only bookstore on the mountain, since you keep what you pay for.

I'm not too familiar with the technicalities of Steam, but I'm pretty certain that not only the downloading but the running of games is in the grand scheme dependant on the connection to the software and server &c.. Such that if Steam went down, your games are rendered unplayable (save for, of course, grossly common illegal measures). This besides the fact that, to my again admittedly weak understanding, technically most software nowadays is not legally owned by the "purchaser", but licensed to the "purchaser" at the distributor's whims.

Pretty sure the legalities of software are set up the exact same way even if you go to a store and take home a physical copy. It needs to be this way because of the inherently duplicateable nature of the product.

Shinoyami65 wrote:Stay away from MOBAs as well. Seriously, there's something about trapping 10 people in a virtual arena for an hour that makes men go crazy.

MOBAs are fucking crazy. One of the reasons I didn't play DOTA 2 for much longer than a few weeks is how fucking cancerous the community is. Probably not helped by how technical the game is, to the point where deviating from a pre-set "purchase order" from the item shop = death.

Lavinius wrote:I'm not too familiar with the technicalities of Steam, but I'm pretty certain that not only the downloading but the running of games is in the grand scheme dependant on the connection to the software and server &c.. Such that if Steam went down, your games are rendered unplayable (save for, of course, grossly common illegal measures). This besides the fact that, to my again admittedly weak understanding, technically most software nowadays is not legally owned by the "purchaser", but licensed to the "purchaser" at the distributor's whims.

Actually steam has an "offline" mode, you can still play games while in that mode and all the games need to run is a steam api that will continue to exist long after steam dies but i doubt it will.

Squigsquasher wrote:MOBAs are fucking crazy. One of the reasons I didn't play DOTA 2 for much longer than a few weeks is how fucking cancerous the community is. Probably not helped by how technical the game is, to the point where deviating from a pre-set "purchase order" from the item shop = death.

Yeah, I want to get off DoTA but I fear that if I leave then I'll miss out on the opportunity to play with friends who are much more into it than I am. Although it does me absolutely no favours and I think it's actually damaging my mental health. I say this after just coming off a match in which I did well and got all my items but still lost and one of the enemy team proceeded to call me a noob for the whole game for no apparent reason other than that he disliked the character I was using.

Shinoyami65 wrote:Yeah, I want to get off DoTA but I fear that if I leave then I'll miss out on the opportunity to play with friends who are much more into it than I am. Although it does me absolutely no favours and I think it's actually damaging my mental health. I say this after just coming off a match in which I did well and got all my items but still lost and one of the enemy team proceeded to call me a noob for the whole game for no apparent reason other than that he disliked the character I was using.

If it's really affecting your mental health, I'd say quit the game as soon as you can. Talk to your friends and find something else you can all play together. Your sanity is way more important than a game.