The Big List of Gaming Gripes

Intro

Welcome to my site you unlucky fool. I've been playing mostly PC Games for... well, years now, and I have opinions. Because this is my website and my rules and you've decided against your better judgement to come here, you can hear these opinions, free of charge.
I might be mostly talking out of my arse, I'm not a game designer, but I do have a background in software web engineering, and certain key learnings around design translate equally well from web to other software.

I'm not sure the form the rest of my site's blogs will take, but this one feels like more of a living post that'll grow over time as I get angrier at the state of gaming, I guess. This'll be in no particular order, just riffing off the gripe in my mind the day I update the post. There may be subposts, if a gripe turns into a rant. Who knows what the future holds?

And with that, let us begin.

Tutorials

I don't have a problem with tutorials, but I have two problems regarding tutorials.

The first one is if a game really needs to explain a mechanic, and the tutorial isn't present, or it's hidden.

Where Art Thou, Tutorial

Not all games need a tutorial, and they fall into a couple of camps. The first camp is if the tutorial actively detracts from learning how the game works or the general experience, for a fairly limited subset of games that will typically be puzzle oriented, where player discovery is key.
The second, which is somewhat the inverse of the first, is that the way the game works is so obvious from the affordances the UI gives. In simple terms, if it's immediately apparent from the tools in front of you how the tools are to be used, you don't need to be told how to use them. Trying to tell a user how to do something that is already obvious based on the way the interface is designed is likely to confuse or irritate the user.

Those types of games are rare though. At the very least, if your game uses the keyboard and mouse, players can't automatically assume a given keymap other than WASD is probably navigation (depending on genre, sometimes that's remapped on strategy games). If you're making an FPS game, you probably don't need to teach people how to walk, and certainly don't need to spend half an hour instructing players on movement controls that are common to pretty much every FPS. Use UI cues and narrative to build appropriate opportunities to explain how to do the things that are unique to the game. If your game offers a limited set of possible actions bound to keymaps (mostly thinking FPS games here), help users out by keeping them on screen. For instance, some games let you drop equipment with the 'G' key, others make that the grenade key, whereas other games prefer the Middle Mouse Button for grenades. A low weight visual key for secondary functionality that doesn't assume this is the only game the player plays will ease transition back into the game.

In short, if you can't take for granted that a player will be familiar with the concepts in the game, failing to instruct them on how to play will likely alienate them. Indie games don't get a free pass either, if you're selling publicly rather than to a closed group of backers, it's generally unreasonable to expect gamers to go hunting outside of the game to figure out how to play

He Looked At Me Like I Was Stupid, I'm Not Stupid

On the other end of the spectrum, a sin particularly of RTS games, but sometimes of overly protective FPS games, are tutorials that insist you need to know everything, even the basics of a genre that has existed for decades. If your RTS does RTS camera an unit control like every other popular RTS ever made, just ask the user upfront if they've played an RTS game before, then flag the basics as done and focus on game mechanics. If you're providing a separate instance, particularly in RTS games, to do tutorial content in, make it so things happen quicker than in a real game (but make sure the player knows this!) so they can learn the game and get to a proper game quicker. Ideally, if you're going to make a player go through a certain amount of mandatory tutorial, wrap it in narrative so that those that know how to play have something else to focus on.

In short, focus on the novel. Refreshers are fine as they help newer players, but make it flow or you'll end up boring more seasoned gamers before they even get started. This is especially true in strategy games, let me mark basic tutorials as read, let me learn the new concepts with accelerated game speed if I want. The more you can customise onboarding to skip the familiar bits, the better the experience.