Nerd Rage, a number of questions.

[Ryko]

Hello, everyone. I'm writing about nerd rage, rage quitting, etc. I'm asking around for people's opinions on why they get frustrated at games. We've all had our moments, either in competitive settings or just sitting alone in the comfort of our homes. What do you think compels you to get frustrated with games, specific mechanics or challenges? Is it just losing or do you get angry if you make any mistakes whatsoever? Do you think the learning aspect of gaming causes a unique frustration even when competition isn't the focus?

Yeah yeah I know, leaky spam or something. Questions are serious though.

[Dimmauk]

Cheap boss moves that one shot, dumb /unskilled players that ruin runs, getting ninja'd, maintenance on days off.

[zoobernut]

For me the most frustrating thing is when I lose or perform poorly due to something that is outside of my control for example, lag or poor game mechanics. If I am playing poorly or making noob mistakes I either start paying closer attention to the game or turn it off and take a break. This is speaking about online FPS games in particular but could extend to other genres.

For single player games I get frustrated by situations where the games difficulty doesn't follow a normal curve and a situation seems out of place to the rest of the game difficulty wise. It is frustrating when a portion of a game is so difficult as to seem impossible and I have to replay it over and over again hoping to get lucky based on some variable like enemy spawns or weapons, health, or ammo available.

This is a very interesting topic of discussion to me and can tie in closely with other player motivations and also discussions of good game design.

[Shiroikage]

[Raldo]

What Zoobernut said, plus multiplayer situations where your adversaries are so much better than you that you have little to no chance of learning how to play better. 'tis why I stopped playing Starcraft.

[zoobernut]

What Zoobernut said, plus multiplayer situations where your adversaries are so much better than you that you have little to no chance of learning how to play better. 'tis why I stopped playing Starcraft.

There is a very fine balance here. You want skill to be important in multiplayer games but you don't really want the best players to completely stomp out the new players to the point where it isn't fun for them. One solution is to have noob channels/servers but that is hard to patrol because there are always those jerk wads who enjoy pub stomping the noobs to inflate their egos. The other solution is to find the average skill level that you want players to be at and make sure that the best and the worst players cannot go beyond a certain range above and below that median point. There are lots of mechanics and methods out there for restricting this max and min range some are transparent to the player and others are less so. If the methods are very transparent to the player this can be frustrating as well because then the player doesn't feel like they are being rewarded for their skill enough and the game just feels like a luck/crapshot.

[Qalbert]

In competitive multiplayer people abusing glitches/extremely cheap tactics gets me pretty pissed.

[hey]

The only reason i would ever ragequit is cooperative multiplayer games, where i'm working with retards that can't handle the simplest of things.

Spoiler: show

The only sub job i used on rdm was nin, and i spent half of the 9 years i played ffxi without a linkshell

[Chun Liroy]

Cheap game mechanics being abused and constantly getting killed (eg. COD) by the same mechanism while feeling helpless against it (Be it a boss mechanic or just plain ole' getting killed by the same person in an online match).

[Eragon]

Like when I decided to try Marvel vs. Capcom 3 online and after 10 wins or so I am facing these people who just air combo me to death before I can even press a button. That's just not fun

[Melena]

I've never rage quit in a team game or mmo, but I have ripped people for retardery. The biggest thing that will piss me off is wiping on progression and you get the asshat who wants to be carried or doesn't care fucking up over and over again. Then it just spreads and more people get frustrated, don't try as hard and yea, shit hits fan. I've also broken a mouse in my counterstrike days when I felt I wasn't playing up to my standards.

[Qalbert]

also I think it's bullshit that quickscoping is a 'feature' now.

[Aurara]

I get frustrated when I KNOW I can perform better than I currently am, and it irritates the fuck out of me.

[quannum]

unskippable cutscenes
press X to jason
event must be done in x seconds, doing it in x+1 seconds means start all over
save points as artificial difficulty, depending on the game
i can't grind in a single player game anymore

[Raldo]

Ooh, here's another one:

When a game deliberately break's its own established in-game rules for whatever reason. A simple example is when it's impossible to kill something before it's allowable for whatever reason in the scripted sequence (particularly those instances where you can nail them down to a sliver a health, but can't kill them until a certain point).

I don't actually nerd-rage though, so I'm just listing annoying things. I took the above one pretty much wholesale from here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...a_bad_game.php

[Chun Liroy]

also I think it's bullshit that quickscoping is a 'feature' now.

Sorry, I'm one of those douchebags. I enjoy quickscoping, it (was) more difficult than using machine guns. Especially in search and destroy it was exhilarating. From what i've played of MW3, quickscoping is a joke.

[Raen Ryong]

When it feels like my failure was unfair or not as a result of me playing badly.

For instance, legitimately difficult games like Demon's Souls or Dark Souls don't make me rage. When I shoot someone in an online FPS 100 times and they take no damage and then turn around and shoot me, it feels very unfair and thus some anger develops (not enough to make me rage typically, has to be many such instances in a short space of time) but yeah. Likewise I hate luck-based mechanics (low drop rates, dying in games like Fire Emblem when my 99% hit doesn't connect but an enemy's 2% one does) etc.

[RKenshin]

Your lack of LJ updates causes my nerd rage.

Urge relieved, serious response:

Factors out of my control and independent of the game mechanics tend to be the most frustrating for me... whether lag, crashing, getting booted off, or a broken aspect of the game, or what.

Sometimes specific mechanics can be the culprit to, but that was mostly unique to the FFXI days where the community as a whole was pretty much on the same page about X, Y, and Z all being broken but it never being fixed or addressed seriously. Those instances often caused a good amount of isolated frustration, particularly while being forced to continually deal with it as a major part of the game (camping kings, AV, PANDEMONIUM ASSHOLE). I say unique to FFXI as, since then, every other game I've played has been pretty good at fixing (or at least attempting to) major inherit flaws/troubles the community generally agreed upon.

[Ryko]

I updated twice in the last month, and I post news articles daily

[The Stig]

People that can't follow the most simplest of instructions:

This one made me die a little inside - I'll write it for none-World of Warcraft players

There is a specific old content boss where you can earn an achievement (trophy) by meeting a certain requirement. The requirement here is simple: round up some adds the dragon boss spawns. When the dragon lands, it will do a fire breathing move. Make sure these adds are in front of the fire breath so they get killed by it. You need 25 of these adds to die like this to earn the achievement.

As it is old content, players have outlevelled this encounter already, and as a result, can easily kill the boss/kill the adds if not careful.

Raid leader issues the instruction for the DPS to "do nothing", tank will control the adds and healers will keep tank alive.

Fucking no one can actually stay still and do nothing. People MUST DO SOMETHING.

How fucking hard can it be to do nothing?! I just afk and watched a film in the corner for about 50 minutes as we kept trying and trying. Despite numerous commands to DO FUCKING NOTHING, people still NEED to do something.

EDIT 2: because people feel like they NEED to do something, they keep killing the adds, resulting in us failing on the achievement, or extending what could be a 10 minute achievement/work into nearly 1 hour.

EDIT:

basically what the fuck is wrong with some people? what are they thinking?

Yes I'm slightly raging writing this lol