Sandbox / Beginners Trap

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Laconic: A weak character, item or strategy that beginners are drawn to

Weak characters, items and strategies exist in all sorts of games. Some of them are notable for being frequently used by beginners.

Common types include:

• Anything with obvious strengths and severe, subtle weaknesses (e.g. a strategy that seems good, and whose weaknesses only become apparent if you have a deep understanding of the rules)
• A strategy resembling something that is good in another game (e.g. spreading your resources too thin in a game that encourages you to specialize, after playing a game that penalizes overspecialization and encourages you to diversify)
• A strategy that would make sense with real-world logic (or at least a common type of fictional logic), when the "correct" play is a Violation of Common Sense
• Anything with a cool factor that suggests it's powerful, even though it isn't.^note It doesn't count if the player knows the "cool" play is suboptimal, but likes to use it anyway because it's fun.
• Neglecting a Boring, but Practical strategy that's usually strong in favor of trying to use something "cool".^note It's not a Beginner's Trap if the "cool" strategy is good when executed correctly... unless beginners tend to mess up the strategy in specific ways.
• Neglecting a powerful move because it has a detrimental effect that sounds much worse than it is, or is actually beneficial. Often happens for moves that get rid of some kind of resource.
• Tutorial Failure — the tutorial shows off poor play patterns that new players imitate.
• The game's AI is nowhere close to resembling human play, and teaches players bad habits.
• The Metagame favours different play patterns from what the game's creator intended and tried to encourage.
• The player being encouraged to perform a bad action by the game itself, such as rushing progress in a game before the player can handle any new challenges effectively.

In some cases, a Beginner's Trap might be Not Completely Useless at higher levels. These still count as long as beginners are drawn to overusing them — especially if the niche high-level application is different from what beginners pursue the character/item/strategy for.

Some developers intentionally put Beginner's Traps in their games to highlight the player's progression — the idea is to make them feel smart once they learn enough about the game to realize that those cards are actually bad. With that said, expect complaints if a potentially-cool mechanic is relegated to Beginner's Trap material.

Overlaps with Trial-and-Error Gameplay, as they both involve acting without sufficient knowledge about the game. May also overlap with Low-Tier Letdown, but this is far from always the case; some of those are so bad that even beginners can tell they're trash, or just don't get much attention from beginners.

Contrast Skill Gate Characters—the difference between one of those and a Beginner's Trap is that the Skill Gate Character will perform well at low levels, while the Beginner's Trap sucks even there.

Compare Sandbox.Common Rules Mistake for another type of mistake common among new players.

Examples

Tabletop Games

Board Games

• Chess: The Scholar's Mate is a four move checkmate that depends on the losing player making natural, albeit suboptimal plays. Nona: I don't love my wording here tbh
• Dominion
  • Buying too many Villages is such a common beginner mistake that there's a slang term for it — village idiot. While Village is an appealing card because it almost never makes your deck worse (it replaces both the card and the action you spend to play it while giving you a bonus action on top of that), there's no point in buying a ton of additional Villages instead of something to use those extra actions for, or money as a payload for your engine.
  • New players often neglect the power of trashing cards (other than the blatantly-detrimental Curse) — after all, why would you want to lose your cards in a game about deckbuilding? The key is realizing that while your starting Coppers and Estates technically have positive effects, they're so weak that they amount to Deck Cloggers outside of specific circumstances.
  • Failing to realize that Copper is a bad card ties into another mistake: buying Coppers just because they're free and you don't want to let a Buy go to waste. Yes, it feels bad to lose a Buy (especially if it means passing the turn without doing anything because you drew a useless hand), but you don't want to take a Deck Clogger.
• Eldritch Horror
  • The game is all about the right group composition, both in general and against the particular Ancient One. Failing to have a dedicated combatant, a support character, and either a magic user or a clue generator (all those roles can overlap, mind you) can make the game impossible to win right from the start. Plus there are specific variables that come into play when facing an Ancient One with some specific gimmick and/or weakness. But since the new players are unaware of any this, it's common among them to ignore pretty much any role that isn't the direct extermination of monsters.
  • New players often go directly for characters that look awesome, but really aren't, as their abilities fall under Cool, but Inefficient, Awesome, but Impractical or both. Since figuring that out takes either experience with the game or reading through copious amounts of fan-made guides, they end up strapped with a truly bad pick.
  • Ever since Focus Points were introduced, they became one of the most handy resources in the game, offering the all-powerful ability to simply reroll and also fueling various other mechanics (or often being required in events as payment). New players almost never bank on Focus Points, seeing the action spent on getting them as "wasted", as all it does is grant the "useless" Focus Point.
  • Lily Chen is one of the better combatants in the game and an all-around great Investigator... unless Personal Stories are in play. Her own story is a particularly annoying Collection Sidequest that will almost entirely take her out of the game until finished, while failing it (which is likely) will De-power her and make the whole sidequest completely wasted effort^note She has to improve all of the six stats, which might turn into a Luck-Based Mission due to gates and/or monsters spawning in the required places, forcing players to fight their way to the city itself or simply drawing "wrong" events when already there. If that wasn't enough, it's a Timed Mission. If she fails her quest on time, the penalty is to decrease all her improvements, sending her back to square one, and disabling her special ability, making recover near-impossible, especially given the amount of time already invested into it. New players rarely take into account just how absurdly hard and time consuming it really is to fulfil her personal quest or that she barely contributes to anything while on it, still picking her on the premise of how great she is without Personal Stories in play.
• In A Few Acres Of Snow new players see the French side as an ample fur trade market, with loads of starting cards having fur symbols and the rest of Quebec offering more of those. Then they add 2nd fur trader card to the mix, because why limit yourself to the starting one. All this overexpansion and extra trader does is make the deck very thick and pretty stiff to play, which makes counters against British aggression very hard to pull or even amass - overextended French player might even successfully sell two full hands of fur cards for a big payoff, but it will take forever to buy and then draw military cards into their hand. This issue is part of the reason why the so-called "Halifax Hammer" strategy was hailed for years as "broken" and "unbalanced" - for it relied on French player having poor deck management and being unable to respond fast for any sign of military aggression.
  • The "War Economy" strategy for the French side borders on a game-breaker, yet it is one of the least intuitive steps for the French player to take. Once all card with military value are thrown into the siege the French deck will quickly be reduced to just four cards: Trader and 3 location cards with Fur icons, granting 6 coins each and every turn. And hands consists of 5 cards, so whatever the French player buys with the load of money, it will instantly be in their hand the next turn - including additional military cards, snowballing the ongoing siege. However, for this strategy to work, the French player can't expand beyond the starting Montreal into the St. Lawrence River and should get into combat as soon as possible - both of which look like a terrible decision for the French, as they have less military cards and with their money coming from fur trade. Yet stalling some meaningless siege can create a near-infinite money supply for the French side, removing the regular weakness of unpredictable draw for fur trading mechanics and power through the Cash Gate for more useful cards. Playing the game "safe" and/or expanding earrly on will in turn make the French player suspiciable to the Halifax Hammer, without any real means to fight back, leading to the game's reputation as "unbalanced".
  • Maths: From what I've read, the HH player's strategy involves having a thin deck. Why did it take players so long to figure out that maybe France should also avoid having a bloated deck? Just curious. It sounds obvious in hindsight. (Especially consdering that by the time AFAOS was out, Dominion players knew that Deck Cloggers are bad.)
  • As far as I understand the general trend directly post-release of AFAOS, people treated it as first and foremost an ECONOMIC game, rather than "all-out conflict on all possible fronts". And it's very tempting if you are new in this game to have both a lot of fur cards and a lot of fur traders, because the French money-making engine (the "war economy" of throwing anything military-like into any given siege and abuse what's left of your deck for money making) isn't really that obvious. It's pretty counter-intuitive to NOT expand as France or ot just end up with Gaspe, Tadoussac and Trois-Rivieres and a fur trader in your deck, for Gaspe is pretty much a deck clogger by itself, while the other two are pretty weak. Said all that, I am always perplexed that people figured out "Ok, British can just push non-stop assault", but never figured out "So the French player must always be at the ready for that and proactive in case of danger". It's like the good old penny-farthing effect: it might seem obvious, but for whatever reason people never connected the dots - for years
• Both editions of London have a rather nasty trap when it comes to the final scoring. The vast majority of new players will focus on the seemingly main activity of the game, which is playing the right cards in the right order for maximum efficiency in activating city. Except the game will then be won by the person who simply focused on buying boroughs and pouring all their resources into that, rather than overthinking the best card combos.
  • A subset of this trap is specific to the 2nd edition, where players see three boroughs on the table that don't work with their current situation and decide not to buy them, because they assume it's not worth it to buy "lesser" cards. And the winning strategy is to focus first and foremost on the points they provide, rather than any additional effects. Plus almost all boroughs give a draw of additional cards, opening far more options to set up your city for activation, along with cycling the deck faster, thus ending game sooner and giving less time to other players to increase their score.
  • Also in the 2nd edition, one of the boroughs offers ability to recycle pauper cards as extra income. While it sounds like a great way to avoid taking poverty and making extra income on the side, it takes enormous amount of time to properly set up and the common single-minded focus on it borders on Complexity Addiction: it's almost never as good as it looks, and any attempt to use it the effect more than once is essentially telling the other players you aren't planning to win, being too busy optimalising paupers.
  • Unless they are warned against it when playing 2nd edition, new players will continuously try to play for income cards. The problem being: there are close to no income cards in the third deck of cards, just expenses. Steep expenses. Thinking this is still doable, newbies will try to borrow money (£10 that has to be paid back as £15) to facilitate their expansion and the particularly lucrative Metro cards... and then the game wraps up, with no money in sight and them sitting on 1-3 debt tokens, each now worth -7 points, effectively undermining the whole effort with Metro cards.
  • Another common mistake is undervaluing certain cards, particularly Hospitals, and/or not matching them with some high income cards. Hospitals are flipped instead of the card that was played with them, thus leaving such card ready to be reused when the city is activated again. That allows to play Breweries or Dockyards more than once, offering a tidy sum of money that can be then played once more - hopefully with another Hospital.
  • Since this is a game about rebuilding and expanding London after the Great Fire, new players will try to build the various monuments under the blue cards and they usually come with what looks like a lot of extra points. But as cool as they are, the vast majority of monuments are money sinks and very often verge on Pointless Civic Project. So sure, building Buckingham Palace is cool... but it costs the equivalent of two boroughs and does nothing except offering a pallid sum of points in the final tally when compared with the pricetag.
• Lost Ruins of Arnak:
  • New players often buy too many cards with cool effects. The problem is that they end up using each of those cards once, then never drawing them again due to the sheer size of their decks. While there are strategies that rely on expending the deck, they want cards with high point values, since those don't rely on being drawn during the game.
  • Ignoring or undervaluing both the Map and Hot Air Balloon cards. Both are cheap one-use cards, offering respectively 3 compasses (enough to start an expedition or buy the majority of artefact cards) or decreasing the cost of an expedition by 3 compasses and offering a free Plane travel icon when used (allowing to have a tier 1 expedition for free, or halving the costs of a tier 2 one). There is almost never a situation where those cards aren't highly useful and open endless possibilities, but because of their single-use nature, many new players just ignore them - which becomes an even bigger detriment, as they are left to be bought by others.
    • Maths: I just find it funny that apparently some new players will reject these cards for being single-use only... while bloating their deck to the point where every card they buy is effectively single-use only.
    • It makes sense on its own, just not within the frame of the rules of the game, making it a perfect example of beginner's trap. After all, a one-use card is "bad", because you can only use it once, and if you buy regular cards, you are going to use them soooo many times, so let's get more of those for their super-powers. And come to think about it, one of Arnak's problems is rather poorly explained pace of the game in the manual. There are only 5 turns, and there are very limited draw options other than the hand for this specific turn, but in the same time moves are near-unlimited within each turn (until you run out of cards in your hand), making it VERY confusing when you sit to the game for the first few times. So people think they will keep getting redraws or at least being able to draw additional cards during the game.
  • A repetitive pattern of developing strategy goes with majority of new players. Once they learn how limited draws are in the game, they overfocus on cards offering them additional draws, still trying to make their big deck work by giving themselves extra draws. Problem being: cards offering additional draws are very limited and either very expensive (Pack Mule), one-use only (Canteen), finnicky to use (Hook) or being misused (Backpack) for wrong ability^note Backpack is best used to draw a card that didn't fit your current hand despite being freshly bought last turn or just bought here and now, rather than being treated as simply drawing any given new card from the bottom of the deck. The end result is still too big deck of too many cards, along with wasting moves, coins and opportunities to make it work.
    • Not sure if this one counts, since it is not exactly a "true" beginner action, being more of a stepping move between a total new guy and someone who gets a hang of the rules, but still comes to wrong conclusions based on lack of experience. Hence different colour and commentary if it even fits
    • Maths: I think it works because players who do this are still new enough to think running a big deck is a good idea. Also, overrating card draw could happen as a result of players coming into Arnak after playing games where card draw really is a strong effect.
  • On the Bird Temple side of the board, new players tend to go for two different traps:
    • Overrating the ability to exile cards from the deck. It sounds good because getting rid of bad cards is usually a good idea in Deckbuilding Games. However, in this case it's underwhelming because you won't go through your deck many times anyway, and the Bird Temple's research track never forces you to gain deck-clogging Fear cards.
    • Ignoring tier 1 expeditions. After all, tier 2 offers better rewards... but on the Bird side of the board, the rewards are not good enough to be worth the hassle when it's easier and more reliable to just defeat as many guardians as possible for extra points. Tier 2 expeditions cost the same as two tier 1s, so this logic quickly leads to situations where the other players can defeat twice as many guardians for the same cost.
• The Quest For El Dorado:
  • A handful of cards increase your current hand, and new players bee-line towards those. Your actual goal is to trim down your entire deck to the bare minimum of cards, ideally trashing all 8 from the starting deck.
  • This ties to the fact that new players, even when observing it in action, are reluctant to do the "trashing dance": reaching a tile with trashing ability, hop in, get rid of bad card, hop out, and hop in right back to trash another. That despite the game's manual describing it as a desirable action. In bold letters. This becomes a true detriment when expansions are included, as they pretty much expect from players to get their deck trimmed down early on.
  • New players ignore the humble Jack-Of-All-Trades cards, because there are seemingly better options than them. Meanwhile, a single Jack offers for 2 coins a universal card with 1 coin, 1 machete and 1 paddle on it, meaning you can get rid of three weak starting cards, without hindering yourself in any way, while granting substantial flexibility. And to make Jacks stand out more, there is just no way to get a hand from starting cards that wouldn't be worth enough to buy them: you will always get a hand worth at least 2 coins.
  • On the other end of the spectrum is the drive to buy Millionaire. Unless highly specific circumstances happen, there is just no real point of getting a 4 coins card, because if you can afford to buy her, you could buy directly the far more useful Pioneer or Native Guide. While there is a highly specific scenario where Millionaire is useful^note The only path leads through high-tier village tiles, as the alternative is high-tier water and all the Captain cards are gone, usually new players get them to be able to afford buying other cards, missing the point they could use their current fortune to buy directly what they truly need.
• Puerto Rico:
  • The original has a beginner trap that should be obvious when reading through the rules: Money Is Not Power. Yet new players time and again try to earn as much cash as possible, rather than setting up structures with all that money, not to mention ignoring shipping goods or even perceiving it as a loss of income, rather than a cheap source of victory points. A recurring situation when playing with someone new is them having the lowest point score of all participants during the final tally, but easily 10+ doublons.
  • Certain buildings are only useful if/when they are built very early on, losing their value as early as turn 5 or even 4. However, on paper, their bonus always looks appealing, making it a common mistake for beginners to get them in later phases of the game. Hacienda is the best example of this mentality: getting extra plantations is always good... but the true profit is only when this is done as soon as possible, and the later it is built and occupied, the less value - and eventually even become a net loss - will it have.
  • In the card variant, you will see new players ignore entirely both Prospector and Councillor actions, overfocusing on plantations and their profits, even if they don't have anything beyond starting indigo yet. Prospector offers 1 card to whoever played it and no cards to anyone else. Unless very lucky, early game plantations are going to score 2 cards at best, while at the same time providing every other player with at least 1 card. Councillor meanwhile is a great way to fish for a card that you are missing. Sure, you only pick one of the lot, but it's a free choice, rather than being dealt it from Merchant. Councillor also has an additional use that's also ignored by new players. Namely, it effectively takes the cards you didn't pick out of the game until the deck is shuffled, all 4 of them (or 6 with Library).
• New Res Arcana players often keep building artifacts even into the late game because many games do encourage you to keep building stuff. However, in this one, artifacts played in the late game will rarely pay off, and it's usually better to use your late-game resources to score points.
• Twilight Imperium has a handful:
  • The game, while capable of going for an entire day on a regular basis, is relatively short when it comes to the actual number of turns - it's usually resolved in just 8, sometimes even sooner. New players usually hear how long the game takes to be played, but not how many actual actions are performed during it, so they overestimate how much time they have for their goals, how many times specific strategy cards are going to be played, and so on. This leaves them underprepared for mid-game, when things significantly pick up the pace, and their master plan requiring the game to run for another 10 turns completely collapses. Just because a single turn can take a hour to go through doesn't mean there is a lot of said turns.
  • New players routinely undervalue the importance of Command tokens (the action points of the game) and especially try to decrease their Fleet counter. After all, it's better to have more actions to perform rather than having bigger fleets... and then a stack of 5 ships with just as many Space Fighters roll over their fleet of merely 2 ships by third turn. And once decreasing their Fleet, such players simply can't amass bigger fleets to counter the invading force via consolidation. Gimping Fleet counter is pretty much putting a neon-sign over your head saying "Invade me", even if you don't have right now fleets big enough to justify the counter's size.
  • Another common mistake of new players is overspending Command tokens early on, trying to dip into every possible action, failing to realise they start with 3 in Tactic and Strategic pools, but only ever replenish 2 per turn and 3 with specific tech. If they combine it with relocating points away from Fleet, it can very easily gimp them for the entire game as early as turn 2, with near-impossible recovery even if they quickly realise their mistake.
    • If all of this wasn't enough, new players almost never play the Leadership card, which offers +3 Command tokens and additional one for each 3 resources spent. This is one of the most sought-after strategy cards in the game, but unless given a clue by more experienced players, new players will ignore this card, since it "only" adds tokens, rather than allowing them to build things or get new techs.
  • It might look like a great idea to spread your space docks over three different systems, so units are where you need them. Except each space dock will then require separate Tactic Command token to use, and on top of that, players get a "free" (requiring a single token from Strategy pool) production action in their homeworlds whenever someone plays a Warfare strategy card. If your home system has more than one planet, building on each of them a dock allows to produce enough plastic to overfill the hex tile. This is another element to the lithany of "New players struggle with Command token management", as it combines a gimped Fleet with overspending Tactic tokens. And while there are situations where spreading space docks is good, it is much more efficient to have a dedicated shipyard hex on a regular basis.
  • Technologies are a bonus, rather than an obligatory feature. It is perfectly possible to win the game without developing a single one, while the game allows players to only ever develop 7-10 techs top (and that assuming the player in question picked the Technology strategy card at least twice and was both willing and capable to pay for the 2nd tech). New players both fail to realise how research isn't a must-do element, and on top of that, try to research everything, rather than focus on a very small handful of things they would really need/benefit from in the long run. Thus they both overdraw the Technology card and overspend resources on technologies, ending up with not enough left to use the techs they've chased so much after.
• Unless highly specific situations are met, action cards from Underwater Cities are mostly useless. But since they open so many cool-looking possibilities, new players flock towards them and keep trying to make them work as part of their strategy, or, even worse, to directly use them. In regular situations, action cards are far more efficient to be played as "one off" power-ups, when you already have 4 in your bank and play 5th, forcing activation of one of those already in play without using any tile, allowing you to play action cards regularly without wasting moves on direct activation.

Collectible Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Cards that do nothing but gain life are a common beginner's trap. They sound appealing because gaining life means you live longer. The problem, as most players eventually realize, is that it's a better use of resources to just build up your board so you can kill your opponent. Gaining life does nothing to stop your opponent's threats, and often ends up just delaying the inevitable. Many of these, like the "lucky charms" are bad on purpose because they make players feel smart when they realize these card are not worth playing. They also contribute to the win rate of stronger players — they won't pick these crappy cards, but a beginner might. Conversely, many beginners are too reluctant to take beneficial actions that involve losing life (e.g. using good effects with a life cost, or simply letting a weak attack go through instead of getting your creature killed because you insisted on blocking).

Tabletop RPG

• Achtung! Cthulhu (and all the follow-up 2d20 games from Modiphius Entertainment) uses easy-to-ignore by new players Momentum mechanics in combat. The majority of tabletop RPGs work best when treating every battle as a set of individual duels or simply ganging on a single target, methodically cutting down one target after another, with the goal being to always deal the maximum possible damage. Momentum meanwhile encourages - and heavily - teamplay, including stuff like Taking the Bullet or non-attack actions that alter the situation in favour of the group as a whole, even if your own character will "waste" their own action, but making it easier for the rest of the group to perform their own actions and keeping the Momentum, eventually providing bonus back to your own actions. This has to be carefully explained to any new player to the system, because their lack of cooperation can easily bog down the rest of the group, as the Momentum will always "die" on their turn.
• Broken Compass is a curious case where people new to the hobby have easier time playing the game than seasoned grogs due to said grogs having counter-productive habits from other games and resolution systems when starting with Broken Compass. Other than that:
  • The rulebook outright lies to players about probabilities of specific rolls. Taking for granted the values as stated in the book is an excellent way to charge head-on toward obstacles that are far less likely to be overcome. And it's rare in this game to fail something, making it all that more poignant to be overconfident in your luck.
  • The game represents both danger and enemies as a complete abstraction. So when brawling with mooks or shooting with baddies during a car chase, the characters aren't facing individual targets, but just an ubiquitous cluster with a specific total "HP bar" to chip down. Similarly, running away from a rolling boulder doesn't really represent evading the stone, but doing whatever the situation calls for, and the more creative the player - the better. For example, "2 Critical Enemies" that represent "a group of mercs on jeeps" doesn't represent X vehicles with Y people on them to be defeated individually, but an entire group that will be gone after rolling said 2 critical successes (so rolling twice three of a kind, a banal feature for any combat-oriented character). Those tend to be easy-peasy to deal with within the game. Explaining this abstraction is notoriously difficult for people who played prior more structured, skirmish-oriented games, as they think in terms of total enemies to defeat, while the rulebook does nothing to make it easier to grasp. Ultimately, such players try to avoid dangers and enemies entirely, missing the whole point of the game, being terrified of the "impossible" odds they are facing, and constantly trying to run away from them.
  • There are five different ways to re-roll a failed check. And when it's a challenge, rather than danger or enemy, failing does nothing anyway. Good luck expecting from new players to remember that, thinking failed roll is just a failed roll, or giving up very early on trying to make it work after all.
• Call of Cthulhu:
  • The game increases skills whenever they are used, with inverse proportion to the current level (the lower it is, the bigger the gain). However, due to the game's reputation and general horror themes, new players routinely avoid using skills they don't start with at least at 60%, which quickly leads to the situation where they have 1-2 skills that are rising at snail's pace and everything else left untouched since char-gen, making them incompetent even if the player finally decide to switch. This have also a specific subset where new players decide to concentrate their starting points to get really high values and leaving them with the default levels in everything else, essentially dumping their entire characters. This very quickly leads to situations where such characters just simply suck due to their Crippling Overspecialisation. Another problem with such narrow specialisation is that when reaching 89% in any given skills, characters regain Sanity. If you start with 85%, you stand a chance to reach 89% during the very first session, thus "regaining" Sanity before you even started losing it. Sometimes less is more.
  • In Pulp Cthulhu, a sort-off Two-Fisted Tales take on regular CoC, new players (both to the game at large and Pulp variant itself) routinely ignore combat skills. After all, this is a horror investigation game and not one where Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? This leads to situations that should be easily braved by the party, but since new player (and often the entire party of them) lacks combat skills, what is intended as an easy and fast encounter turns into a Total Party Kill, even after including bigger HP pools Pulp Cthulhu characters have.
• A big part of the controversy surrounding Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition comes from its "Ivory Tower design" (with its designer's constant defense of it not helping its reputation). The idea was that the game wouldn't really indicate what you should go for, leaving players to use trial and error to find the good options. This amounts to deliberately filling the game with beginner's traps, and players risked ending up with a useless character after months of play in a game expecting Min-Maxing and full optimalisation. They eventually turned to "solved" character designs on the Internet to avoid the trial-and-error process, which led to the interesting situation of new players starting with "expert" knowledge of what the builds are, but not knowing why they work and others don't.
• In GURPS it's pretty common for new players to both spread their points too thin and trying to reach really high values in countless skills and stats at once, ironically ending up with a really expensive character that's still terrible at various tasks. It's a running joke within the community that any character designed by a new player can be recreated at 1/5th of the point budget by seasoned players, as nobody sane is going to sink more than 7 points into a single skill, unless the goal is making a Flying Brick. A specific subset of this behaviour is about ignoring skills with a shared base or that can be used interchangeably. A character with Guns (Muskets) doesn't really need to also get Guns (Pistols) in a swashbuckling pirate campaign. Nor your characters require to have at least one point in any given skill (a behaviour taught by a wide variety of TTRPGs) to be able to use said skill in the first place.
• Hollow Earth Expedition, for its mechanical simplicity, has a pretty complex character creation system. It is also a rare case of a TTRPG where making Jack of All Trades does not lead to Master of None and in fact, spreading yourself thin is a very solid choice for a character. The problem with char-gen that new players have is undestanding there are two different pools of points in use: first "character creation points", which are spent on 1:1 basis, and then, once assigning Stats, Skills and picking either a starting Resource or a Talent, also providing 15 experience points, which fall under standard rules of increasing Stats and Skills. The last part routinely confuses new players, as they make any of the following mistakes, unintentionally gimping their character right from the start:
  • When spending "character creation points", they don't aim to max-out any given value, especially when it comes to Skills. That pool is enough to get any 3 skills to the final, 5th rank. For comparison, getting one skill from 0 to 5 with regular experience points takes 30 of those.
  • When making their character, they fail to utilise the final 15 experience points to get low ranks in a bunch of secondary skills, instead pouring them all into a specific venue. Unless buying a 2nd starting Talent (which will use up the entire starting experience), the exchange ratio between experience and ranking up Skills will render this absurdly inefficient. This leads to a highly Crippling Overspecialization, with characters having three, maybe four Skills to their name and nothing else.
  • Overfocusing on a single Stat, rather than trying to get as many to 3 or at least 2 as feasible. This is another subset of Crippling Overspecialization: with 3 in any given Stat, it takes only a single rank of related to it Skills to automatically pass easy and default tests without needing a roll^note And with 2, it takes 2 ranks in related skills, but that's still viable and easy to attain. And this is not some sort of logic loop or exploit, but the intended mechanic of the game, representing characters that are simply competent in their field of expertise to deal with routine situations by simply pushing forward, rather than failing what should be their hat.
  • The game punishes "unskilled rolls" (0 in related Skill) with a -2 penalty. At the same time, having merely 1 point in a skill (which costs just 2 experience points to get) not only removes that penalty, but obviously offers that +1 to the Skill Rating. The starting pool of experience allows to buy ranks in 6-7 different skills, making the character extremely versatile. Sure, they won't be world experts, but they will still be far more useful. What doesn't help is that the in-game example characters, along with the character creation process example, heavily encourage "one-trick pony" character design, with characters that are very narrowly focused, yet at the same time aren't actually min-maxed into full utility, making almost all of them unintentional cases of "painfully average" character design, further encouraging new players into trap they will then spend a loooong time to recover from - while also being Master of None.
  • All in all, the game mechanics punish high starting specialisation - while niche specialisation is typically a hallmark of skill-based systems - and encourages going for low, but reliable Stat and Skill values. This goes on a higher level when the players in question only had prior experience with class-based systems, further going into narrow specialist approach and suffering the indirect consequences of such starting character design.
  • I struggle to explain it in a short and precise manner, help badly needed. I also wonder if it should fall under Tutorial Failure, given the chargen chapter sends counter-productive message to new players, despite explaining in detail how things work: so you know how to make a character, but not how to make said character work
• Shadow of the Demon Lord has dozens of Status Effects, each working differently and applying different buffs and debuffs, making them an important element of the gameplay loop. Ignoring them, either when applied already to someone or simply not even trying to apply them to targets, is a great way to end up just facing a variety of impossible-to-defeat enemies or having the combat drag on forever against numerous, but weak mooks. Applying Status Effects is also a great way to cut through Early Game Hell. Yet other than memorising them, it's very tedious to use them at all for players in general and new players in particular. It's not helping that the game doesn't stress how important Status Effects are in its rules. The end result is new players simply being bored out of their minds due to whacking everything on their way without any variety or bored out of their minds due to how long combat ends up taking when having to constantly flip through the rulebook to check on status effects, despite the game being marketed as "fast and simple".
  • If it comes as complaining about the system, that's just terrible wording and I can't crack it myself. The point is that new players routinely ignore the plethora of additional effects and suffer for it greatly, but the worst fact is that they end up complaining about the game being bland and boring due to a massive case of Tutorial Failure
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay comes with two very specific "new guy" issues: either people new to WFRP, or people who started with WFRP and are trying something new. Both are related to the mechanics of Fate Points. Fate Points are a specific meta currency, essentially allowing players to pull whatever they want and shoulder it on the GM to deal with the consequences, no matter how crazy the action itself, but being secured that their characters survived. Now, people new to WFRP usually consider Fate Points to be Too Awesome to Use, or use them for something they've been planning for weeks, essentially wasting their intended use as a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card and encouragement toward a head-on approach to problems. On the flipside, people who branch out from WFRP tend to approach any game with any kind of meta currency the same (or worse - ones that don't even have those in the first place), expecting that no matter what, they will throw the token at the GM and order them to declare their action a success. Sufficient to say, it almost never works the same way.
• The Witcher: Game of Imagination has a few Dump Stats, some more obvious than others. However, Constitution is not one of them. Seemingly all it does is governing how much Vitality characters have and a bunch of secondary checks and calculations... which is precisely why one should never dump it. Yet other than Movement, an actual Dump Stat, new players routinely dump Constitution, ending up with Glass Cannons at best, just glass characters on average. Part of the game's reputation as "highly lethal" has more to do with how many people ignore Constitution than the rules or combat actually being lethal.

Video Games

Strategy Games

• American Conquest:
  • There are three general faction groups in the game: Europeans, natives of the Mesoamerica and natives from the rest of North America. The last two play in a vastly different manner, not just from Europeans (which is obvious even to beginners), but also from each other. A common mistake among new players is to treat all natives interchangeably (which works with Europeans), despite their different economic models, different unit progression (and different units themselves) and different styles of running warfare.
  • Just because certain native nations have units armed with firearms doesn't mean they should be treated like a regiment of line infantry. Yet you will see new players sending them into battle just like regular musketeers. They are dedicated Sword and Gun units, that should fire their guns and then simply charge toward the decimated enemy, having an edge in close quarters. To make it worse for new players, it is completely counter-intuitive if they've played with European factions prior, where charging with musketeers is the last resort Death or Glory Attack.
• Cossacks: European Wars:
  • The trademark scale of the game, with commanding armies of thousands of individual units, is overwhelming for new players, who are more used to more typical ranges of 200-500 units total of your average RTS. By Cossacks standards, that's just one-two regiments of line infantry, or the workforce needed to just operate your mines. This leaves new players with both crippled economy (as they have insufficient number of workers) and even more crippled military (since they have a literal handful of units).
  • New players routinely ignore 17th century units, unless playing as a country that can't advance to the 18th century. Unlike Age of Empires, Cossacks only have two eras, so the starting one is perfectly viable, and in many situations, 17th century units might actually be better than their later replacements. Not to mention, not building them makes it much easier for early game wipeouts without even employing typical rush tactics, as the new player will have severely undermanned defenses.
  • 17th century musketeers are crap, even if your faction has a special variant. It's not about their damage, but the horrendous amount of time it takes to recruit them and how weak their upgrades are, or that they can't fight in melee, because they lack bayonets. If a new player decides to give 17th century units a shot, you can bet it's going to be generic 17th century musketeers, that can be bum-rushed by just about any other unit and effortlessly dealt with.
  • New players avoid melee infantry in general, forgetting that the game covers the period of pike-and-shot tactics. But they ignore 17th century pikemen especially, even if they combine armour, cheap price tag, cheap upgrades, a really fast recruitment time, and can brave just about anything that isn't a mass-recruited swarm of disposable 18th century musketeers, which nobody is going to have access to for the first 30-50 minutes. Any experienced player will continuously produce 17th century pikemen for the entire match due to their enormous staying power.
• Paradox Interactive:
  • Their games are infamous for being filled to the brim with noob traps, of three distinctive flavour: giving players cool, but ultimately useless toys to play with; requiring in-depth familiarity with under-the-hood calculations done for the sake of various mechanics to properly synergise things; and finally, being balanced around the fact players tend to roleplay historical outcomes, rather than going for some bizarre, but highly rewarding moves.
  • Cities: Skylines: For North American players unfamiliar with urban planning principles, it'll seem intuitive to build important facilities on major roads. However, as with real life, doing so makes the infrastructure incredibly congested. A more practical approach is to have a hierarchy between local and connecting roads, alongside transit that makes cars less necessary overall.
  • Hearts of Iron series in general, and III and IV in particular, are choke-full of options that are very tempting and look even cooler. Probably the biggest mistake new players make (and even old veterans from II did on release of III) is constructing a pure tank division. On paper, they should be very strong and able to plough through anything. Except without proper infantry support and half-decent air control, tanks are sitting ducks for just about anything, and short of facing some backward military, they will be easily forced to retreat after suffering substantial losses. Oh, and as a rule of thumb: navy is just wasted production and resources, you are better off either not having one or simply building naval bombers to sink enemy navy at pittance. That knowledge doesn't prevent people from still building the most elaborate fleets and researching naval technologies.
    • A very specific trap for Hearts of Iron happens in IV, where following historical decisions and outcomes as the Republic of China is the surest way to get overwhelmed either by Japanese, disloyal "allies" forcing themselves into the government or the Communist-staged uprising. Trying to recreate Second United Front is pretty much asking to be deposed. All while, at first glance, it offers a wide array of options, numerous and useful allies, and the option to peacefully integrate them into the structures of RoC. It reached such infamous status within the playerbase that any newcomer asking how to make the United Front work is laughed off before being sent to any of the previous, archived threads dedicated to the subject. The actual solution is to never even bother with diplomacy and start gearing toward conquering the would-be-allies right off the bat.
• Rise of Nations
  • The game uses extensively Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors. It can be ignored early on, but from Medieval Era onward, not having a healthy mix of units is the surest way to get stomped on, even by beginner AI, the result getting worse and worse with each following era.
  • Ignoring or undervaluing the specialties of each civilisation is a common rookie mistake. Unlike other RTS, where a faction might get some special unit or a small bonus, the specialties of each civilisation offer a major change in their gameplay, development path or army composition - or offer them a unique way to defend themselves against attackers. Trying to play the game with the "Cosmetically Different Sides plus some minor mechanical differences" mindset can have truly disastrous consequences.
  • There is a resource cap, that determines how many resources can be produced per minute. There is absolutely no point in extracting more or overbuilding, so making extra Worker Units or building new extraction structures is a net loss of resources. In the early game, this can significantly slow down the overall growth of your faction, since vital food is wasted on redundant workers, rather than researching to the next era. Furthermore, certain technologies increase extraction rate, meaning you don't have to build new structures or recruit additional workers after certain point, as it will hit cap anyway.
  • While being ostentiably a base-building RTS, the game borrows numerous elements from the 4X genre. This means it is very easy to overlook the importance of expanding, and, more importantly, settling as many cities as early as possible, while on top of that using every possible building and upgrade that extends the range of borders.
  • Directly tied to border expansion are Temple and its upgrades. They offer passive Wealth growth, without any extra hassle. But what's more important, that Wealth is going to be worth more than whatever trade routes are possible to set up early on. The problem is that, at first glance, Caravans offer bigger revenue, offering three-digit income when reaching their destination. That last part is misleading for new players. Before the Caravan arrives, the Temple is going to produce its value a few times, outperforming a single Caravan without much issue. And the more cities are built and thus the borders expand further, the more passive Wealth from Temples, so additional Caravans will still be outperformed. Caravans only really catch up by Industrial Era, but reaching it without the maxed-out Wealth from Temple is going to take far longer, while it is entirely possible to get your current resource cap growth on Wealth from Temple upgrades alone.
• The first four games in The Settlers series have a very similar basic gameplay loop, however, the details are different. In the first and second games, due to it being mostly a logistic puzzle and the abstraction of making units, it was best to have a single ironworks and blacksmith, to ease the hauling of things to the nearest warehouse. In the third and fourth games, due to the removal of the iconic flag-and-road system, transport became easier, as did managing moving large quantities of goods. So people who started with a chronological order of things ended up with a seriously underdeveloped metal industry, having but a single weaponsmith barely making any weapons, while players who started later in the series, completely clogged their network by overproducing steel and weapons, overloading road connections.
• XCOM 2:
  • Early on you get the option to research the Skulljack and then use it on an Advent Officer. However, doing so will allow Codex enemies to appear, and doing it when the game prompts you to instead of waiting for some time will usually cause it to happen before you have even properly developed laser weaponry for your troops, making them far harder to deal with.
• Zoo Tycoon:
  • The operates on the principle of an actual zoo, rather than that of a tycoon game. Admission ticket prices aren't going to cut it when it comes to even the most basic expenses, and hiking them too high is a great way to scare people away entirely. Animal enclosures earn pocket change in donations from visitors, no matter how perfect they are or how well-treated the animals are inside. Thus, your main source of income is going to be those things that most people hate so much about zoos: petting farms, fancy, overpriced restaurants, garish T-shirts, low-quality animal shows, paid-separately facilities and squeezing as much cash from food and drinks as feasible. But since those are the things people hate about zoos in real life, most new players avoid building them, and quickly end up in a death spiral of debts.
  • Another element that's routinely overlooked by new players is making a single enclosure for different herbivores from a single biome. This decreases expenses significantly, visitors love them and animals are actually happier when kept in shared enclosures. New players are usually scared away from those, because different animals have different needs when it comes to terrain in their enclosures and thus making it more ideal for species A makes it less ideal for species B - rather than focusing on making it good enough for A, B and also C, D and also K. Not helping matters is that big, red sad face showing over animals whenever you place the wrong tile of terrain inside their enclosure.

4X

• Civilization is a long running series, with each game in it having its own set of traps:
  • There is the "Expand" part of 4X. If you aren't expanding constantly in parts 1-3, the AI will simply overwhelm you by sheer numbers. It doesn't matter how well-placed your cities are, if you have 10 of them and the AI has 30, it's going to outproduce you even without cheating.
  • Speaking of which: one of the most common mistakes done by new players is trying to land their cities perfectly: no overlaps, ideal use of resources and special tiles, good balance of production and what not. Ultimately, in area that could house two-three decent cities, they have one, if perfectly placed. Except until it will expand to its full potential, half of the game will pass. Overlapping cities not only are good, but oftentimes they end up being far more optimal in the long run.
  • Parts 1-3 had the Despotism Penalty. As long as under the starting government of Despotism, any tile that produced more than 2 of any given resource automatically received a -1 penalty. That meant upgrading various tiles was utterly useless, as you were bumping their default 2 to 3, receiving no benefit. Trying to irrigate grassland is probably the most common mistake - until adopting either Monarchy or Republic it will be just wasted time and effort of the worker unit. In 2 and 3, the only exception were special resource tiles, as those had extra production that could overcome the penalty, but it was still exceedingly inefficient.
  • New players ignore the importance of rivers, and rarely take them into account when settling new cities. Rivers on their own provide a variety of benefits and if cities are by them, they don't need Aqueducts (1-3) to keep growing, along with being qualified for a few additional benefits - most prominent would be the game's version of wonder providing a free hydropower plant (1-4). Also, when placing cities next to rivers, new players build Aqueducts anyway, since the game neither informs that it's not needed nor blocks the option itself.
  • New players routinely don't disband units they don't need nor use, often stunting both their budget and the ability of their cities to grow. Balancing units around and their upkeep was especially important in Civ 2, where, other than money, units were also taking away production from the cities they were produced in. This was especially important when keeping excess, but garrisoned units in more or less secured areas, along with having just way too many worker units (and unlike further installments, worker and settlers were one and the same, so that unit could be used to simply make more cities instead).
  • In 3, Republic is by far the best government form, especially for economic accomplishments. However, since in just about every other Civ game, Democracy is a direct improvement on the Republic, people implement it, even if it's almost never an improvement and requires highly specific circumstances (that almost never happen) to be beneficial. To make it worse, researching Democracy requires a bunch of otherwise useless technologies and going through a pointless revolution to switch the government, significantly stalling research and general performance This mistake is so specific to that exact installment, both veterans of Civ 2 and anyone who came later and simply tried 3 out of curiosity are falling for the same "Democracy trap".
  • Culture slider, when still existing in the games, allowed to easily placate the general population of your civ, usually for pocket change, by offering the ability to gain a trainload of happy pops, balancing the unhappy ones or even granting additional bonuses due to general happiness. New players see this slider as burning money, as it doesn't directly increase research nor budget growth, and thus are not only stuck with unhappy pops, but also have to spend more time, money and production to build and maintain "happiness structures", along with routinely having to use their pops as non-workers to somehow manage the current tech-gate on controlling unrest.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
  • Similarly to Civ series, the game has an early game production penalty. Unlike Civ 2's Despotism Penalty, it lasts as long as specific techs aren't researched, and, more importantly, it's far more severe. The tiles simply don't produce more than 2 of anything that's made on them, unless it's a special resource tile and only that one specific resource. New players not only needlessly upgrade fields already producing 2 of something (like Rainy tiles producing 2 nutrient getting a pointless farm), but also mismanage which fields should be upgraded and how. If that wasn't enough, except for Gaians, everyone has to first unlock the specific technology to even get the option to build Formers, the in-game Worker Unit. Which aren't nearly as important or vital early on, yet new players, used to other 4X titles, rush towards it and heavily overvalue its importance.
  • A trap specific to Civ veterans new to SMAC comes in the form of roads. In the Civ series, roads increase commerce/money/whatever it is called in that specific game. In SMAC, energy is produced only by specific structures, while roads are there solely for transport. However, building roads, doing so extensively or without having specific mid-game structures in that specific base, is treated as a disruption of the Planet's eco-system, which will start to defend itself by spawning boils of mind worms.
  • Many new players fail to utilise modifiers for population growth. If the counter hits one way or another 60% Population bonus, it causes "population boom" and instant growth of population each turn - the same effect as if having the Cloning Vats secret project build, widely considered a complete game breaker worth nuking from the orbit whenever anyone but your own faction has it. Cue numerous players sticking to a simple 40 or 50% bonus to population growth, meaning their bases will still spend countless turns to grow, without the dedicated push needed to reach the 60% bonus and thus vastly faster population growth.

Deckbuilding Games

• Slay the Spire: Two Ironclad cards are notorious for being both major Low-Tier Letdowns and Beginner's Traps:
  • Clash, a 0-energy card that does 14 or 18 damage if there are only attacks in your hand. The free damage makes it appealing to new players, who underestimate how often it will show up in your hand alongside non-Attack cards you can't get rid of, rendering it useless: a lot of enemies give you Deck Cloggers (and from Ascension 10, you start with an unremovable one in your deck), or you might take a high-cost Power and can't play your Skills that turn. Also, picking up the Snecko Eye, which the Ironclad often wants to do, nullifies its only upside (free damage) by randomizing its cost.
  • Searing Blow, a card with the gimmick that it can be upgraded to boost its damage any number of times. That sounds great because you can get its damage pretty high (without increasing its cost)... but this comes at the cost of neglecting to upgrade other cards in your deck — card draw, energy generation, block, or in-battle scaling — if you want it to be the big damage button it advertises itself becoming. Not to mention that Searing Blow forces you to visit as many campfires as possible to justify taking it, which could guide you down an inferior path devoid of other nodes that could help you. It's a lot better on Endless Mode, though, where you will need that extreme power ceiling to take down the later game cycles.
• Monster Train: Demon Fiend looks appealing to beginners thanks to its 50/50 statline and simplicity as a big Vanilla Unit that you can just plop somewhere. Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems: its cost of 4 Ember is higher than your starting 3 Ember per turn, so you can't play it at all without an Ember upgrade (generally considered an underwhelming option) or help from Artifacts or Ember-generating cards — and if you're hoping to draw the Fiend after your Ember-generating cards, too bad, the Banner unit system actively works against you by giving Fiend draw priority, causing it to clog your hands (and even if you can play it, you're likely giving up a chance to play a better Banner unit). And even if you manage to play it, all you get for your trouble is a 50/50 that clogs 3 Capacity on a floor and scales poorly because it has no inherent abilities to help it improve.

Shoot 'em Ups

• Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View: New players usually use their meter to launch level 4 attacks way too often because it sounds like the most powerful attack should be useful. However, it's not very good in practice because a level 2 or 3 is sufficient to clear your screen (while leaving more of your meter), and the opponent can just respond with their own charge to deal with the boss sent by your level 4. And there are other ways to send a boss to your opponent. As a result, level 4 charges are relegated to niche situations.

Turn-Based RPGs

• Pokémon:
  • Many new players teach their Pokémon nothing but moves of their own type, whether because it seems intuitive, or because they know about the Same-Type Attack Bonus (STAB). This works okay in the single-player campaign, where you can grind to compensate for poor movesets. However, their lack of coverage to deal with 'mons that resist their STAB moves means you'll have a hard time if you try the Player Versus Player mode.
  • In play on Smogon, some Pokémon are notorious for being spammed even though they aren't very good. This is a problem because of how the tier system works: it's usage-based, so a beginner's trap mon can end up stuck in a higher tier where it can't compete if enough people keep using it. Luckily, they'll usually drop eventually (even if you may have to wait a generation or two) though.
    • Electivire looks appealing because of its good coverage and ability that in theory makes it a good partner for Gyarados. However, it ended up performing poorly because it wasn't strong enough to efficiently KO opposing 'mons, and the predictable Gyarados/Electivire combo became undesirable as soon as players learned to see through it. It was picked frequently enough to remain in the OverUsed tier in its debut generation despite being unviable there.
    • The Eeveelutions are popular and heavily marketed, as well as having no competitive issues obvious to new players. One side effect of this is that they're notorious for beginners who insist on trying to make them work even when there are better options available.
    • Ambipom was stuck in RarelyUsed in Gen VI because of its tempting Technician STAB Fake Out, which effectively gives it a 90 power move that always flinches the opponent, with the downside being that it can only be used on the mon's first turn out. Unfortunately, that's all it has going for it. In all other areas, it's badly outclassed by other Normal-types, and Technician STAB Fake Out just isn't worth using it for. The Smogon analysis is even titled "DON'T USE AMBIPOM".
    • Shedinja is a One-Hit-Point Wonder whose ability prevents any direct, non-super-effective damage. It sounds near-invincible, but that's far from the truth: it's actually very vulnerable because both indirect damage and its weaknesses are everywhere. In high-level play, it's relegated to niche usage when there happens to be a major threat that can't touch it.
    • Zoroark is overused by new players because of its ability to disguise itself as the last Pokémon in your party until it takes damage. This sounds more impressive than it is because Team Preview helps the opponent see it coming, and it's possible to scout for it with entry hazards. Its other traits aren't very impressive either.
    • Donphan was completely outclassed at what it's designed to do by a ton of other options, but was still stuck in OU in Generation V solely due to the number of bad players using it. This earned it the derisive nickname "Elephant of Lame".
• Tiny Space Program: Venus is within the player's scan range from the very start of the game, offering a quick credit infusion. However, scanning it so early is a mistake, since actually landing on it and colonising it is extremely difficult due to its high gravity (the only heavier planets are Earth, where the player starts, and gas giants, which cannot be landed on). As soon as Venus is scanned, there is a chance that the daily missions will be directed there and will be impossible to complete, causing the player to miss out on many valuable tech points. Experienced players know that settling Venus is an endgame activity.

Other

• Mount & Blade series has rather strict progression of units: the higher tier they are, the better they are at fighting and the better gear they carry. This affects both unit conscription and how to approach various bandits (in most cases - charging head-on). Then came the With Fire and Sword mod, which eventually became a stand-alone game. It's biggest change to the gameplay loop is that almost all ranged units are armed with firearms. This means that the crummiest of militiamen armed with the most primitive muskets can easily take out the most elite units - something that routinely takes new players by complete surprise. And even after getting used to how deadly guns can be, they still neglect low-tier musketeers, overpaying for supposedly better units that are only marginally better at killing, rather than sticking with low- and lower mid-tier musketeers.
  • Best exemplified with eventually hiring country-specific mercenaries - new players will grind them to higher tiers, failing to realise the real power of those mercs is custom-selected equipment, rather than their level or skills. So a tier 1 rifleman recruit is only slightly worse at aiming than a tier 4 elite, but costs a fifth of the upkeep, allowing to simply hire more of them and then just point five times as many Miquelet Carbines towards the enemy - some are bound to hit.
• Star Wars Episode I: Racer offers an upgrade system for the podracers. It obviously includes the speed of the vehicle. And it is by far the least useful and most unhelpful stat of them all, yet for obvious reasons, new players focus entirely on it. As a result, their podracer's cruising speed is that of starting boost and they can't make sharp turns, while the track design quickly starts to look like a corkscrew.