Scrappy Mechanic / MMORPG

• For a long time in City of Heroes, when a team completed a mission that multiple members had assigned, only the character whose mish had been selected by the team leader got completion credit from the contact. A minor thing, until you get to the Hollows and all the contacts are linear in the zone story arc, so every hero of the same approximate level is doing the same missions from the same contact. Nothing like a 4-man team hitting the same eight Outcast bases and securing their weapons in a row. Blessedly, the devs saw how painful this was and later everyone who had the mission available got credit.
• Elsword:
  • Stoic Treshold. In theory, something that would prevent players from performing infinite stunlock in bosses. In practice, a cheap countermeasure that forces player characters to suffer a knockdown.
  • Most bosses have telegraphed attacks and long invincibility frames for when they do it. While this is considered by people as "challenging", it's actually a hindrance if your character can't deal much damage. In some fights, such as Avalanche and Iplitan, damage doesn't make much difference, because they have scripted attacks that prevent players from attacking when they reach certain HP quantities.
  • Magic Wardrobe is a customization system that didn't leave the Korean server for a reason: Registered pieces for custom avatars can be dismantled, giving Magic Stones of the Wise/Sage stones. While the Sage Stones have a lot of RNG in them, this can be a problem because Sage Stones give huge stat enhancements, thus becoming an easy way to become a powerful fighter. As of now, MW became available on any server.
  • Item storage is limited at will, and every row of slots is paid individually. This means a player has to spend a lot of cash/K-ching/Elcoins in order to get more inventory space. This also applies to being able to use more skills and more quick-slot items.
  • During some stages in Peita, glitter/Vargo archers will shoot down arrows on the players. This is frustrating, due to the fact that there are plenty of stages on which you have to cross gaps.
  • A recent update removed the solo players from getting "Assemble of Heroes" buff after they finished a dungeon and wanted to retry. Prior to that, there was a bonus stage, "Gate of Darkness", that forced players to go back to the lobby after either finishing the stage or refusing to enter.
  • In other instance-based games, an NPC that offers gear repair service awaits players after you clear the instances. Not the case here.
  • VOID Elsword, a private server, offered full support for graphical mods and voice change. Somewhere around 2016, the owners of VOID decided to drop that, with the claims of Hackers using said support for graphical and sound mods as a means to cheat without punishment.
  • Ironically, shortly after the mod ban incident, A player named "Inaste" managed to use a trainer to make treasure chests spawn infinitely in every instance, thus proving the owners of VOID's current view on modding wrong.
• World of Tanks
  • Prior to patch 0.9.0, the game had a much hated matchmaking system that balances tanks teams based on HP rather than tank performance or player skill. This in turn has lead to many situations with light tanks facing off tanks that are 4 to 5 tiers higher. These matches would become unwinnable since light tanks can't harm higher tier tanks even when flanking and are outspotted by higher tier mediums, rendering them useless for scouting and harassment. Although subsequent patches have ironed out the tier gap, the matchmaking will always be known by fans for being horribly drunk and unbalanced. The matchmaker has since been toned down to only go two tiers in either direction (so a tier 6 will only ever see a tier 8 maximum or a tier 4 minimum, and never both simultaneously), but this still leaves bottom-tier light tanks at risk of being outperformed in their scout role by a top-tier medium.
  • Equally hated is the 'gold ammo' system, whereby players may purchase a special type of premium ammunition with increased performance (usually penetration) for either gold (purchased with real money) or a grossly inflated amount of in-game credits. The idea was to encourage players to keep a small amount of these 'gold ammo' in reserve for emergencies, however, nothing stops players from stocking up on nothing but gold ammo. Players who carry nothing but gold ammunition are often accused of buying their way to improved tank stats over players who can't afford to carry a full rack of gold ammo.
• The 'Old' Arena, in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN, had an interface cumbersome and fickle enough to qualify as Scrappy on those grounds alone, was difficult enough to qualify as Scrappy on those grounds alone, and had different enough expectations of skillset than the rest of the game to qualify as Scrappy on those grounds alone. Eventually, it was removed, and its name and most of its interaction with the rest of the game was welded onto another part of the game.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • The game had a "much-maligned, super-secret hidden interaction between +Monster Level and +Noncombat Chance" (as the creators themselves called it in the update scrubbing it from the game) that was added with NS13. Specifically, if you had a positive net +Noncombat Chance, then for every +5 Monster Level you had, it would cancel out +1% Noncombat Chance. The intended point of this was to nerf a Player-Preferred Pattern of always pumping the two stats as high as possible, but it only made anything that gave +Monster Level not only useless, but an active detriment to the player in most scenarios. It was removed a year and a half later.
  • These days, though, ask a KOL player who's interested in speed about delay(), if you're looking for a rant. Delay() is a mechanic that briefly delays whatever plot/quest-appropriate outcome you need by a amount by a random number, to ensure that no matter how nice the Random Number Generator is being to you, it will never be that nice to you that you'll get the Macguffin on your first or second time in an area. Die-hard fans of speed running hate delay(), because there's no way of protecting your carefully planned-out run through the game from random elements. Jick has said he doesn't like delay() either, and while he is phasing it out, it's taking a while. In the meantime, it's 5 in all areas.
  • "Ronin". In a Normal run after ascension (which the game heavily suggests you take), you cannot gain any outside help for 1,000 (previously 600) turns. In theory, this is to make the game more fun and challenging by making the player have to rebuild from scratch (with what they have in Hagnk's as a buffer) instead of just getting everything from their friends. In practice, having to do the early levels over without even being able to tap into the Clan meat generators, Flea Market, or Mall is just plain boring and takes forever (most players can only do about seventy turns a day). Players griping about how many turns of Ronin they have left are common sights in chat.
  • The Avatar of Boris remains a greatly popular challenge path... except for one problem: there's a hard cap on its skill points, since you stop gaining them at Level 15. This was meant to encourage multiple runs (you start with more points every run), but one must notice that later classes with their own skill trees (the Zombie Master and Avatar of Jarlsberg) don't have any such caps. (The Zombie Master gains points from "Hunter Brains", gained from special enemies, one of which spawns every other day without limit, and Jarlsberg gains skill points every level without end.)
• Lusternia has a few:
  • The Sanity Meter gradually erodes when time is spent on The Astral Plane or inside Muud. Initially just causing amusingly nonsensical hallucinations, it rapidly worsens into full blown insanity, represented by approximately 50% of your commands being cancelled out or replaced with others. This wouldn't be so bad if Astral and Muud weren't the two best places to grind for high-levelled players outside of Aetherspace (which itself qualifies as a Scrappy Mechanic).
  • The Envoy system is also not great. The idea is to have representatives from each class liaise with the administration to preserve Competitive Balance. But most envoys are biased, and just try to ruin other classes skills and buff their own into the stratosphere. The few envoys who actually do preserve balance are so rare they're actually given increased status by the administration just for doing their job.
• Runescape:
  • The way people are paired up in the Fist of Guthix minigame. Level 10s playing against level 100s is an all too common sight.
  • In dungeoneering, "You can't light a fire here." You do not know the reason why a fire cannot be lit there. You still drop the logs even if you cannot light a fire there. However, logs will not be dropped out of DG when you can't light a fire.
    • More infuriatingly, 'You can't drop items here'.
  • 'The iron is too impure and you fail to refine it'. Yes, it's probably necessary to keep iron bars from flooding the game, but damn is it frustrating to mine a massive load of iron and then lose most of it just because the Random Number God hates you. For a new player, it just feels like the game giving you a big middle finger. Fortunately, your success rate improves as your Smithing level gets higher, but by the time you get the highest success rate, you're just five levels away from smelting mithril. There's also other ways to get 100% success, but many are just too impractical to use.
  • In an effort to combat bot programs (And to frustrate legitimate players), Jagex changed the fight mechanics of Frost Dragons. Frost dragons used to be just like any other high level dragon: A melee attack, a magic attack and of course, dragonfire. Since these monsters are extremely profitable and frequently botted, they gave frost dragons a ranged attack... and the frost orb mechanic. While fighting frost dragons, at any time a small, difficult to see blue orb would spin around the dragon. Attacking while an orb was present would block all damage, and rebound any damage you would have done. This causes players to kill themselves very quickly if they don't pay attention 100% of the time. Needless to say, the only players who support this update are the players who never fought a frost dragon.
  • The Squeal of Fortune minigame and its replacement Treasure Hunter, for a number of reasons both in-game and in real life. For starters, the developers apparently think that playing it is the first thing players will want to do when they log in, as the first thing one now sees upon doing so is an irritating popup that must be clicked on (starting the minigame) or dismissed before you are even allowed to move. Second, most of the common rewards are useless; while they do scale to your level, it's always stuff the player can get with little to no effort. Third, it's a fairly blatant cash-grab, as it entails the "ability" for free players to win items reserved for those with paid subscriptions, at which point a cheery "Give us five bucks a month to redeem this cool thing!" message will come up. Finally, and most importantly, it allows player to buy spins with real money. This was also known as 'real-world trading', something Jagex has railed against for the entire existence of the game. When asked if this made them hypocritical, the developers responded with, essentially, "Oh, it wasn't buying items with real money that was the problem, it was buying items with real money FROM OTHER PLAYERS." If it's possible for something that isn't a character to be a Creator's Pet, this minigame would probably qualify.
    • It gets worse; despite the intense hatred, Jagex continues to update the Squeal and prioritize Squeal updates over almost everything else. Hardly a day goes by where they aren't hyping the next Squeal update or talking about how cool the previous update was. They've also dedicated a day to old promotions, meaning that nearly every day there's a promotion. The cycle now goes: Tuesday - Old promotion; Wednesday - Advertising of new promotion; Remaining five days - New promotion. Sometimes they skip the advertising and make the promotion six days long. And this happens EVERY SINGLE WEEK!
• Mabinogi
  • RNG. Repair rates are affected by it, Item drops, Gachapon drops are effected by it, and the list goes on. 90%. Seems high right? Wrong. The game seemingly wants to screw you over and generate the 10% to fail.
  • Disconnection Penalty. You have to wait a minute in order to log back into the game. Before the Dawn of Dungeon update, this kicks you out of the current dungeon with no chance to go back. After the update, you get five minutes to return... assuming that your computer and the server can reconnect you in time.
  • Magic Crafting and Hilwen Engineering. The two skills are very time consuming and are almost impossible to level in solo play.^note Both skills have a single area where you can only train the skills, and the areas where you gather their materials are infested with multi-aggroing mobs. Some of the mobs are immune to knockback. Plus, they are bunched up together. Have fun.
  • Commerce. You have bandits who attack you as placement encounters, and they get difficult on how more expensive your cargo is. Commercing also gives you a debuff that lowers your damage rate for some odd reason, and when bandits successfully steals any Scathach commerce items, You are not getting it back.
  • Bandits in usual- low end, if not, all computers seems to have a severe slowdown when they appear- This is a problem if you're doing a commerce run.
  • Ducats. Commercing and Outlaw Hunting are the only way to earn them. Fortunately, Ducats are all optional. BUT, if players want to get their Composing rank from Ranks 5 to Rank 2, you will have to dish out 900,000 Ducats from an NPC.
• MapleStory:
  • PVP. The main problem is that a number of classes tend to perform better in it, so players of other classes are sometimes nearly unable to win. This, combined with the facts that very few people play PVP anymore (to the point where it's empty on smaller worlds), and the fact that some very powerful rewards are available from PVP, make it so that even suggesting a round of PVP will get you some good snickers.
  • Travelling between continents, especially in older versions. In these older versions, travelling required you to wait several minutes for a ship to arrive, buy a ticket for a high price, then get on the ship and wait several more minutes to arrive. Given that the game's content was spread all across the different continents, you had to travel a lot and lose a lot of time. An update made the tickets free, and another allowed you to rent an airplane that went faster than the ships and removed the need to wait for the ship to arrive, but having to spend a few minutes doing nothing is still pretty boring.
  • In older versions of the game, Party Quests (which were by far the best source of experience) were limited to one party per channel. If the quest you wanted to do was already being done by another party, you had to go to another channel and hope that this one was open. Given that there was a limited amount of channels per server, it was very possible that every single one was currently occupied.
  • In older versions, your character's starting stats were determined by dice roll. If you wanted a character with optimal stats, you had to spend several minutes clicking the dice and hoping that you'd have enough points in the stats your desired class needed and four or five points in the others.
• The Lord of the Rings Online
  • There used to be Radiance, a raid-gating mechanism introduced with the first expansion pack. Raids in the base game allowed anyone to join, and encouraged diverse builds by having crafted, raid, and world-drop gear being relatively equivalent. In the expansion pack, you could only raid if you were wearing a specific armor set, acquired by playing the same 3- and 6-man instances many times over. This was somewhat OK when it gave you a 10% boost to health and damage, but this was removed to improve the viability of non-Radiance armor sets, which still weren't viable because you can't raid in them. Later raids required different armor with higher Radiance, but often with worse stats, meaning that to progress at all, you often had to spend a long time grinding instances in the hopes of getting an armor drop that was worse than what you were already wearing. The system was later removed, with the developers publicly making a mea culpa on the entire idea.
  • "Loot boxes" are rare drops that contain ... something. You won't know unless you have a key to open them. Keys are (even rarer) drops, but you can conveniently buy them from the LOTRO store for Turbine Points (which you bought with real-world money, or were given for a lot of grinding... killing 250 enemies in a high level area might be worth 10 TP, for example). Loot boxes occasionally have good equipment. More often they have one-use temporary buffs, or one-use permanent buffs that you can't use because it's the wrong one (for example, you can only use the Will IV tome if you've already used Will I, II, and III, and haven't used a Will IV yet... of course, you can buy those from the LOTRO store, also). All in all, loot boxes are a pretty blatant cash grab.
• If the North American servers are anything to go by, SD Gundam Capsule Fighter has a ton of them.
  • The initial one was the RPS System, which utilized Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors to determine who would be strong against what. Thus, it was entirely possible for a Zaku II (who was a Rock-type grunt fodder unit) to defeat the Freedom Gundam (who was a Scissors-type high-tier unit) with ease. This meant that PVP and PVE battles were determined not by skill, but by unit type as everyone would try to match everyone else.
  • Going hand in hand with that was the Custom System. The Custom System allowed a player to increase the stats on a unit to make them stronger or tougher than their base rank, meaning units that were already overpowered became even more overpowered and broken in an instant. With the arrival of Generation Six update, both were done away in favor of a parts system. However, even this is broken as, nine times out of ten, players would slap on parts that would, when they hit their opponent with machine gun-type weapons, affect them with a flashing aura that will drag their framerate down considerably to the point where they can't fight back.
  • Like the Lord of the Rings Online example, the game has Rare Capsules every once in awhile, which is supposed to give you a chance to obtain a rare unit. However, it seems that the company can't make up its mind on the drop rate: the first time they did it, people came out with nine or ten of the same unit and the second time, very few people came out with units.
  • MCA, or Motion Cancel Action, is this, due to the fact that some players just can't master it, thus this Ascended Glitch can be seen as out-and-out cheating.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron. The Sigil System. In the early years of the game the devs enforced a level cap system to all players that would be unlocked sequentially at levels 4, 8, 12, and 16. Players would be unable to progress if they hit any of the above mentioned levels without first acquiring a sigil to unlock the next group of levels. And these sigils could be acquired through normal gameplay or through the micro-transaction store for real world money. Acquiring them in-game was very prohibitive as even the lowly bronze sigil was considered a rare drop and the drop rates only got lower as you went.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a few so far.
  • One is the platforming required to obtain Datacrons, which boost stats. It's a lot of platforming on an engine that really wasn't designed for it, crossing areas with dodgy meshing. Some require a party to obtain, and a single mistake means you have to start all over from the beginning. Makeb's endurance datacron is nearly impossible for players to obtain, and confers a huge amount of Bragging Rights. More recent patches have made the bonuses shareable across the account, making it a bit better.
  • Another Datacron, noted for it's unique difficulty, is one found on Tatooine where one must wait HALF AN HOUR IN REAL TIME on an air balloon just to reach the datacron. Mind you that the half hour wait is for ONE direction, so if you miss it, good luck waiting for the next ride down. Worse, some classes have a significantly easier time of it, being able to jump to where another player is. Bear in mind, too, the Gameplay and Story Segregation involved in telling Jedi and Sith characters that they can't simply leap to a platform unless someone else is already there...
  • The next is the seeker droid. You get a popup on your screen that the seeker droid detects something in your area. The "area" in question can be an 500+ foot radius. Your seeker droid has about a two-foot radius, and only when you are practically on top of the item will you get any indication of what direction it is from your dig. Good luck killing several hours digging up nothing.
• Star Trek Online
  • Chain holds, which sciencey-bad guys like the Voth and Species 8472/Undine perform, where a player is stuck between a powerful Gravity Well-like attack and being hit with attacks that slow you down to keep you in the hold.
  • Lockboxes and Lobi ships for a number of reasons, the biggest two being that, due to the fact that these ships are villain ships, they shouldn't be playable at all. Another is that Lockbox ships can only be earned through Lockboxes and it's a basic cash grab to try to win one of them.
  • The mere fact that the Romulan Republic isn't an actual faction. After a certain stage, you're asked to join either the Federation or the Klingon Empire as part of an agreement. On one hand, this gives Romulan players a leg-up, as they can fly their allied faction's ships up to Tier 4 and use their consoles/weapons, many players would rather not have a crutch and be their own group. In fact, after the events of the Season 9 Featured Episode "Surface Tension", there have been calls to finally fix this as the Federation/Klingon war is over.
• Wizard101: Critical and Block, due to adding even more luck-based mechanics to the game. In Wizard 101, the chance to critical on a hit (or heal) increases by your Critical Rating (though your level also factors in a hyper convoluted calculation that lowers your critical chance percentage as you level). Block Rating in turn allows you to block critical hits (though you can't block heals). As more updates happened, all stats creeped up and Critical Rating went batshit insane. As of the time of writing this, the metagame revolves around spamming critical hits before your enemy can spam you to death.
• Pirate101
  • Ever since the Advanced Pets and Companions update, if one of your Companions is defeated in battle it will become wounded. You leave it in bed rest for minutes at low levels or up to 5 hours at max level in order to recover, awaken the unit and use it wounded (meaning it has a lower max HP) with a longer healing timer, or pay obscene amounts of money to Miracle Mitch to heal your companion instantly. At lower levels the cost is low although not worth paying due to the short timer. At mid level it's more expensive and at that point you'll need a lot of gold to upgrade your ship (especially since starting at Book 7, or Big Sky, you can upgrade to a very handy Bison Frigate, then you'll need a Marleybone Skiff in Book 8, or Port Regal Skyway, if you don't wanna get boarded every time doing the infamous quests leading up to For Elena or the many nautical side quests, and then you'll need a Bison Galleon in Book 9, or Tumbleweed Skyway, if you are to complete the many quests that require sinking ships without tearing your head out). At higher levels, the cost is so high that unless you're farming the Tower of Moo Manchu it's better to just go limp or use another unit altogether.
  • The third currency, Scrip, drew ire from many players for seemingly taking time away from developing the Vaporware Book 15 update and being very annoying to obtain. You need Scrip to buy anything in the Black Market from neat furniture items, to the most luxurious Ship Cabin, to brand new class-specific banners. The problem? Every single desirable item is insanely expensive compared to the pitiful amount of Scrip you earn (more on that below). Would you like your class' banner so that all your class companions perform better in battle? That'll be 12,500 Scrip, please. Want a luxurious Ship Cabin without having to pay Crowns? Cough up 25,000 Scrip (used to be 75,000!). Would you like the Pentacle of Tentacles Doubloon? That'll be 1,000 Scrip per. It apparently summons tentacle minions but no one even knows what they have or how good they are because no one has had 1,000 Scrip to spare on trying out a potentially worthless minion Doubloon when the Aquila minion Doubloon is fairly common and summons great minions. Also, you can only obtain Scrip from two ways: (barring a free starter sum of Scrip that you earn from the introductory quest that can only afford you some towels)
    • 1-Receive anything from 0-12 Scrip for every ship you sink (and that's if those are high level ships, low level ships have even lower ranges). Unlike almost every drop in the game, it's randomized for every player that sinks the ship, so you can't reliably farm with a group of friends until you all have enough for whatever you want unless you stick back to help the poor sap that keeps getting 1-4 Scrip from ships that drop anything at all.
    • 2-Do the insanely hard gauntlet Smuggler's Cove where you must face 10 consecutive battles without healing in between (unless somebody uses a Treasure Bath or Scriptop interrupts to speak between matches and gives you a chance to use a Potion). If you win this 3-hour-long gauntlet (for a well-prepared team, that is), you get anywhere from roughly 400 to 500 Scrip (the amount is also randomized per player rather than for the whole team). If you lose in the final battle, the most you can get is around 100 Scrip. If you lose any further down, you'll get less Scrip than if you had spent that time farming ships in Aquila (going as low as around 5 scrip if you lose in the second fight). Oh, and did I almost forget to mention that this is a housing instance (similar to Wizard101's Midnight Sun Pagoda and the other housing instances) that costs 7,500 Crowns? Thankfully, only one person in a team has to have it.
• Guild Wars had the original Signet of Capture system. The Signet was the only method for acquiring Elite skills from bosses. The original design required casting the Signet at the same time as the desired skill. Timing this was extremely finicky as you might accidentally get a different skill, especially when after short- or instant-cast skills, and some bosses simply wouldn't use their Elite. Eventually it was modified so the Signet triggered off the boss's corpse and gave an option of which skill to learn.
• When Phantasy Star Online 2 launched in Japan, upgrading weapons was reliant on a Random Number God system that made it harder to grind out higher-level upgrades, sometimes resulting in the weapon downgrading in the case of a failed grind attempt. Players by-and-large hated this, and the NPCs that handled grinding, Dudu and Monica, were near-universally reviled as a result (not helped at all by Dudu's seemingly-smug attitude and Monica coming across as an unqualified klutz). Later updates added "New Type" weapons that did away with the RNG-grinding, instead requiring only that players use other weapons to upgrade them. When the game made its way to the West, pre-"New Type" weapons were completely abolished, and previous weapons that only had the original grinding upgrade option were given "New Type" versions.
• Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds:
  • The NFT and blockchain integration found in the North American, South American, European, Middle Eastern, Oceanian and South East Asian servers are widely panned by players who are tired of the crypto hype and the damage to the real world economy (especially their contribution to the CPU and GPU shortage problem) they have caused. Made worse when it was discovered that the Far East Asian, Korean and Japanese releases of the game will continue to not have NFT and crypto support.
  • Lava Valley is generally considered this by all but the most top-tier players due to the way matchmaking is done turning it to almost entirely a Luck-Based Mission. Specifically, when you begin matchmaking, you are placed in a party with two other players, your total CP (combat points) is calculated and then that team is pitted against another team with approximately the same amount of CP total. The problem is, no attempt is made to compensate for the possibility of wildly varying CP amounts among individual players. As such, for example your team may be as follows - Player 1: 1,500,000 CP, player 2: 1,000,000 CP, player 3: 1,2000,000 CP. Meanwhile, the opposing team is Player 1: 2,000,000 CP, player 2: 900,000 CP, player 3: 800,000 CP. More likely than not, the 2,000,000 CP player will simply obliterate the opposing side, sometimes without dying once. You may even find yourself on a team where, say, you're at 1,000,000 CP and you have an ally on your team who is only 300,000.