irritation
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The Daily Grind: What behaviors get your goat?
There are people who you don't like in any MMO, and that's more or less a given. But sometimes even the people you like can drive you into a paroxysm of rage. You could have known someone in the game for years, rely on them implicitly, and yet always feel that tickle of rage when they start slowing down in order to loot things in the middle of combat. (Or if you're playing City of Heroes and they stop mid-fight to tinker with their Enhancements, which is even worse.) The problem is that these sorts of behaviors aren't bad things by themselves -- none of them have a major impact on gameplay, and they're not large enough to force an argument or discussion. But they irritate you, even though they're not a big deal, and you can't help but notice them. What sort of stupid human tricks bother you when you're playing? People looting in combat? Not mentioning when they need a quick break to recharge? Talking too much or too little? Let us know!
The Daily Grind: What struck you as unnecessarily annoying?
If you took part in the recent City of Heroes double XP weekend, as a long-standing customer or a returning visitor, you most likely had a chance to take part in one of the game's Safeguard/Mayhem missions. Heroes are tasked with preventing a bank robbery, while villains are instead given the job of robbing said bank. Unfortunately for villains, their robbery is faced with several enemy groups that spawn without warning and will follow you all over if you happen to miss them. Worse yet, death puts you in prison, forcing you to fight your way out and possibly condemning you to another swift death. There are a lot of little things that can add up in a game, little choices in design that wind up making the whole play experience more tedious and unpleasant than seems reasonable. As a result, the whole experience can wind up going straight down the tubes. What part of a game proved to be annoying when it really didn't need to be? Was it a quest with more travel or fighting than seemed necessary, an area with some particularly obnoxious geographical feature, or just something that was a whole lot of effort for very little reward?
The Daily Grind: What little bug is a big problem?
You know the one. It's a tiny bug, a problem that only comes up once in a blue moon -- if it's even a problem and not just a slight problem like a model clipping issue. You really shouldn't care one way or the other, it's so irrelevant... but you care. You can't help but care. The very thought of it bothers you. And even though it's something so obscure that you're not sure if anyone has even bothered reporting it other than you, or so rare or so unnecessary, you still get angry when all sorts of other minor bugs get fixed and this one persists. We're not talking about bugs that people can legitimately point to as impacting quality of play today, like the infamous Vanish bug in World of Warcraft. We're talking about those minor issues that you can't let go of, sometimes even long after you've stopped playing the game. What small and ultimately irrelevant bug just can't help but get your goat every time it comes up? How do you try to work around it? Have you reported it once, multiple times, or not at all with the expectation that the developers must know about it already?
The Daily Grind: Do you like getting lost?
In everything from fantasy to science fiction, maps are important. Frequently, navigation comes down to a character picking up a compass, or a sextant, or activating the cross-subspace differential beacon scanner, picking a direction and then heading that way with all the certainty of an indecisive ferret. But that isn't usually a problem in most MMOs. Hitting the "m" key is frequently pre-bound to bring up your map, and you usually have a minimap as well, in addition to a dot on your map representing exactly where you are and arrows pointing you out where to go. In games that support modifications, you usually have several of them devoted to making navigation even easier for players. Every so often, however, you wind up underground or in an area where your map doesn't work for whatever reason. And there's something to be said for that sense of adventure, that lack of a map and a clear picture where you're going, to have to just strike off in what you think is the right direction. Today, we ask: do you like being lost and having to find your own way? Does it make the game more invigorating for you? Or is it an obnoxious gimmick designed to frustrate players and force them to take more time for simple objectives?
