Things that you will NEVER include in your game, or hope to never see in another's.

[Helel]

We've all played those games, where a certain aspect irked us to no extremes, even to the point of making us throw our controllers against the wall and weep like a little babe without the comfort of a mother.

Well, at least I have. Once. Maybe.

As Freud said, our experiences from our childhood shape our adulthood, and so too do our earlier gaming experiences shape what we consider to be our ideal game. We all have 'dream' systems--things which we wish to include in our projects or wish to find in other's, whether it's character development, gameplay, or otherwise.

HOWEVER, this topic is not about that. As the lengthy title suggests, we are here to discuss THINGS THAT YOU WILL NEVER, EVER, NOT IN A MILLION YEARS INCLUDE IN YOUR GAME (or hope to find in another person's), and for a bit of an added bonus, ways to counteract these from appearing in games.

tl;dr: Let's talk about our gaming phobias.

I'll start this off with the most obvious:

• Random Ecounters - Unless the battle system is quite fun or the rewards are good, I will do everything in my power to escape or avoid random encounters. Under levelled? Don't give a damn, just want out of the dungeon. It's worse when there's an encounter around every TWO STEPS OH GOD. At that point, I usually just load up a cheat code that disables random encounters. =)
  
  There are several methods to solve this, namely:
  
  * Visible on-screen encounters (ie. enemy sprite walking toward the actor, etc.)
  
  * No non-scripted encounters (battles from story progression only)
  
  * No encounters whatsoever (Yeah..)
  
  ..
  
  
• Main character death = game over. Playing the Persona series, it really grates my nerves to be met with the game over sign whenever some enemies decide to have fun and gang up on the MC... Particularly when instant death spells are fairly common.
  
  As for death itself, I honestly don't mind it as long as reviving items are easy to find in proportion to the frequency of expected deaths. (If instadeath is common in the game, please please make that Life spell cheap or let revival items be bought/found easily)
  
  ..
  
  
• Unskippable Cutscenes - Especially before boss battles. As if losing to a boss isn't frustrating enough, being met with the same old cutscene over and over, over and over again is torturous.
  
  How to solve this in RMXP:
  
  * I don't know if this will work, but run a parallel process that checks if a certain button is being pressed. If it is, set a switch on that skips the cutscene to the main event/afterwards.
  
  ..
  
  
• Useless Status Effects - Basically when status effects are so worthless that no one in their right mind would use them when they could be spamming Ultima to hell and back again.
  
  Some ways to avoid this:
  
  * Increase encounter difficulty - If winning a battle constitutes pushing 'a' and occasionally using a magic spell, then try to increase the battle's difficulty. Of course, with increased difficulty should come decreased frequency of said battles.
  
  * Increase infliction rate - If, say, Poison's infliction rate is around 80%, then more people will obviously be inclined to use it.
  
  * Increase Scope - Or if the infliction rate is rather low, increase the skill's scope to include more than one target to make up for the lack of accuracy.

... Alright. This topic will certainly be handy for any people looking for some direction in the development of their game.... I guess.