Roll and move. Skip your turn.

Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don’t want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.

Not the worst, but I’m annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can’t be there.

A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games’ so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.

Then after you’re comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven’t seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.

One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion Skyrim where I found this, particularly annoying.

I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don’t like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.

What I can’t stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.

“Here’s a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you’re still on level 2.”

I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression

Lootboxes

Puzzles that are entirely music based with no visual cues.

They’re bad enough for me as just a guy with no rhythm or note recognition, but also just fuck deaf people I guess?

Any game that forces snap to center cameras. No one should ever have to fight against the controls in a game.

(Looking at you No Man’s Sky)

You know when you are in the middle of a game’s story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.

And I’m the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don’t take what I worked hard to get.

Escort Missions. Especially when pathfinding AI was terrible.

Quick Time Events in a game that it isn’t the focus. Halo 4 had exactly two quick time events. One in the first level and one in the last level.

Health as a resource

Achievements.

I want to enjoy the game, not artificial milestones for bragging rights.

I’ve got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I’m not sure if it existed before then.