Scrappy Mechanic: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|''[[Mario Kart|Blue Shells]] Ruin Everything''|''[[Boxer Hockey]]'', [http://boxerhockey.fireball20xl.com/example.php?id=037_blue_shells.jpg Episode 97]}}

** On the NES had a scrappy mechanic that absolutely made no sense when compared to the other Zelda games, even the first one. The game used a lives system and if you happened to run out, it was back to the very start (Zelda's palace) which meant a ''very long'' trek back to where you were before you died and believe me, the majority of the dungeons were worlds apart from each other. But at least the last dungeon, which is the farthest from the starting, lets you continue from the beginning of that dungeon (and this mercy is only to work around technical limitations with how the final dungeon is stored separately from everything else).

* In ''[[Act RaiserActRaiser]]'' your god avatar has a set number of spells per level attempt. That's right, not per life, per level attempt- you don't get your magic back when you die. If you use all your magic against a boss but ''just'' fail to defeat it, then your only choices are to work out a way to beat it without magic or to lose all your lives and start the level from the beginning again. Although the unresponsive controls and mediocre collision detection were pretty bad problems, the magic issue stuck out as both clearly deliberate and plain mystifying.

* The follower system in ''[[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood]]'' and ''[[Assassin's Creed: Revelations]]'' have gotten a fair share of flack for making gameplay too easy.

* Den Defense from ''[[Assassin's Creed: Revelations]]'' is an [[Unexpected Gameplay Change]] complete with a poor interface and zig-zagging difficulty. One of the first things confirmed for ''[[Assassin's Creed III]]'' was that Den Defense would be cut.

* 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 4four-man team hitting the same eight Outcast bases and securing their weapons in a row. Blessedly, the devs saw how painful this was and now everyone who has the mission available gets credit.

** The Envoy system is also not great. The idea is to have representatives from each [[Character Class System|class]] liaise with the administration to preserve [[Competitive Balance]]. But [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters|most envoys]] are biased, and just try to [[Nerf|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''.

* ''[[RunescapeRuneScape]]'':

* ''[[Super Mario World (video game)|Super Mario World]]'', ''[[New Super Mario Bros.]]'' and ''[[New Super Mario Bros. Wii]]''.

** The worst part is that the Fluzzard levels are almost identical to the [https://web.archive.org/web/20130801121115/http://www.zeldawiki.org/Fruit_Pop_Flight_Challenge Fruit Pop Flight Challenge] from ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]].'' However, the Fluzzard levels are outclassed by far by the minigame from a game that came out four years earlier. In the Zelda minigame, the game involves actual flight, more mobility, and works off of the Wii's pointer function instead of inaccurate waggle controls. Why they couldn't have simply copied the mechanics whole cloth and come out with a much less frustrating mechanic is anybody's guess.

** Also, when you die in the original Galaxy, you're [[But Thou Must!|pretty much forced]] to go back to the start menu ("Would you like to save and quit the game?") and find your save file again when you die (possibly a form of [[Anti-Poopsocking]]?). Every time. This gets pretty annoying and tedious after a while, and was luckily fixed in the sequel: here you just go back to the [[Hub Level]], like it should be.

** Mach Speed sections in ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006 (video game)|Sonic the Hedgehog 2006'06]]'', in which Sonic runs uncontrollably fast and has to veer around hundreds of obstacles, can't stop, and can easily get caught on scenery and die instantly because the controls are so loose and it's so difficult to see anything coming. To expand, a mere tapping of the stick will veer him way too far in the intended direction, he can't correct himself in midair after he jumps, and if he trips on something he'll lose all his rings and be unable to react, and in the process will likely careen head-on into another obstacle and die. It makes Sonic's levels the most annoying of the lot.

** The drop attack is mapped to the [[PlayStationPlay Station 3]]'s motion control function, which almost never registers your input properly.

** In addition, the first game's Gummi ship sections were widely hated for being slow-paced and boring, which the developers [[Rescued Fromfrom the Scrappy Heap|thankfully fixed]] by revamping the Gummi sections entirely for the sequel. A less fortunate example is the [[The Little Mermaid|Atlantica]] level, whose three-dimensional control scheme was so annoying that the developers decided to do something completely different with Atlantica in the sequel...by [[It Got Worse|turning it into a rhythm game]] (which, thankfully, remains optional...in theory, seeing as you have to beat Atlantica to get the best ending and some extra gear).

* In many d20 and [[Dungeons and& Dragons]] adaptations, player characters are often only permitted to open chests by forcing them or picking the lock, both all-or-nothing approaches that can take ages for a hard lock and a malevolent [[Random Number God]].

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls FourIV: Oblivion]]'':

* ''[[RoguelikesRoguelike]]s'':

* ''[[Final Fantasy II]]'' is basically ''made of'' Scrappy Mechanics, some (but not at all all) of which have been reworked across the many ports and remakes, but let's see if we can't pin down some of the worst.

** Fleeing monsters. Random encounters will run away from ''you.'' Remember what was said earlier about it being a good idea to artificially prolong the random encounters and/or fight yourself to increase the odds of stat boosts? Fleeing monsters simply wrecks that unless the player takes care to kill one at the start of the fight. At the least, it will shorten the fight. At the very worst, if all monsters flee before you can kill them (because either the back attack mechanic hates you or because you were attacking yourself), you get no rewards whatsoever.

** Yes, spells get more powerful, except for Life. Life never gets stronger, just costs more MP. Bah.Good thing the Life spelltome is available fairly early in the game and is relatively cheap, so you can just trash the spell and learn it again to reset the MP cost to 1. Later ports correct this by making higher levels of Life give the target more HP when revived.

* ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' had two such mechanics that were thankfully acknowledged and fixed for thelater first time on the DS versionreleases:

** The game only had one inventory with a limited number of slots, lumping together healing items, equipment, and key items. Inventory management was a pain and you either had to throw away items to make room or have the Fat Chocobo hold them for you. The DS version does not have an inventory capacity, while the PSP version greatly expands the inventory limit.

** ''[[Darius]] Gaiden''{{'}}s rank doesn't get as retarded as ''Garegga''{{'}}s, but its implementation is worse. Each of the 7 tiers of stages has a "default rank", which the game sets to when you collect a powerup on that tier. And once you raise the rank, there is no way to decrease it. Ideally, you want to stop powering up after the 4th stage. Wait, what's that? You lost a couple lives on the last stage and took a big hit in shot power? Too bad! Either deal with it or face a [[Difficulty Spike]]!

* ''[[Heavy Weapon]]'' for the PC. Your tank aims using the mouse cursor, that's fine. The problem is that it ''also moves towards the mouse cursor'', making it annoying to dodge attacks while aiming. This makes facing enemies like [[Advancing Boss of Doom|Bulldozers]] (which move towards you and [[One-Hit Kill]] you if you brush against them) a complete pain. Thankfully, [[Pop Cap]] realized this mistake and made aiming and moving separate in the [[PlayStationPlay Station 3]] and Xbox360 releases.

** [[You Fail Economics Forever|The Dwarven Economy]] It, not to put to fine a point on it, ''doesn't work''. It's generally accepted that it's best to turn it off, and failing that never mint any coins. If nothing else, keeping track of all those little objects will slow your computer to a crawl. RemovedEventually removed from game.

** Strange moods. They are often beneficial to the player, but that all depends on the whim of the [[Random Number God]]: the dwarf may be possessed, in which case he will not receive any experience. They may request some material that isn't available at the site (much like with some requests of Nobles), which results in certain death unless a trader happens to bring said material. And of course, more often than not, the resulting artifact has no practical use.

* Some of the disasters in ''[[Sim CitySimCity]]'' can get this way, but even more so is when "Residents demand a stadium."

** Water structure placement in general in ''[[Sim CitySimCity]] 4''. Some, like beaches, have lenient enough parameters that they're not so bad. Others, like marinas, require you to waste thousands on pinpoint terraforming, and even if you somehow get it right a minor glitch may cause the structure to appear submerged.

** [[Sim TowerSimTower]] has a requirement for reaching a 4 star rating: A VIP can randomly show up at any time, and in order for them to approve of your tower, they have to first be able to park in an open VIP parking space in the parking garage, then they had to stay in a clean hotel suite. To keep them cleaned, you have to put in a hotel service room, and the maids will do their job. The problem is: it's IMPOSSIBLE to remove these rooms after they've been placed (even the subway station, which takes up an entire level, can be destroyed and removed.) They serve no other purpose than to clean the rooms. You can increase your hotel's population and revenue far more with other room types you already have access to, rather than sticking with hotel rooms. At least the security guard stations (which also can't be removed) serve a purpose of protecting the tower against bomb attacks, which can destroy sections of multiple floors.

* * In the fourth edition of ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'', Skimmers received a lot of hate because they were excessively hard to kill. The worst offenders were Eldar skimmers equipped with holo fields and spirit stones. Add in how most if not all Eldar players typically run three Falcons (or some other skimmer) with this setup, and you have something that made a lot of people angry. Thankfully, they lost a lot of their power in the fifth edition.

*** "Yeah, so one kill point for the Devilfish, and one for the Drones." IG players are preaching to a blue choir on that one. There's also the 'nid Biovore when the edition first came out. Every time you fire, your enemy gets a kill point. Fortunately, most of the kill point issues with these armies were resolved through updated books and FAQs.

* Examples from ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]'':

** Inconsistency Rollingof to hitmechanics in 1st and 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. While the rules generally made it pretty easy to work out what you had to roll to accomplish something in almost any given situation, in almost every other case a low dice roll was a good thing. When rolling to hit, however, players had to roll high. Many people felt that assigning characters a number that was lower the better protected-they were was rather counter-intuitive. Expressing a character's skill in battle as the minimum roll needed to injure a person in full plate with a shield and a high dexterity (as opposed to, say, the minimum roll needed to injure a naked person) was arguably worse, however.

** [[Word of God]] (Gary Gygax himself) said that he wished he hadn't included the rather cumbersome weapon type having bonuses against certain AC types (almost universally ignored mechanic), and that he only included psionics in 1st edition because a friend talked him into it (the same mechanics was introduced as optional earlier; AD&D2 fixed the ludicrous part, but now it had problems ''because'' it was optional and attached to the rest badly). 1st edition had a LOT of Scrappy Mechanics. They were just flat ignored most of the time and most DM's made houserules instead.

** Levels limits for races other than humans. For low level games, utterly irrelevant as a balancing factor. For higher level games, OTOH, they put a giant brick wall in the way of the demihuman races being useful, because suddenly you *couldn't gain anymore levels.* ToOf addcourse, insultthere towere injury,"Exceeding theLevel levelLimits" limitsoption also(offsetting actedthem asfor furthergood straightjacketsstats) onand characterSlow design,Advancement sinceoptions outside- ofslow thedown singleXP favoredgain classat for a giventhese racepoints, theyand werepossibly oftenhalve sobefore lowit as([[Forgotten toRealms]] berulebook punitive''Cormanthyr'' evenrecommended into ause lowboth levelfor game. Thankfully eliminated in 3e andnonhuman latercampaigns).

** ** In a similar vein, level adjustments. They are almost never worth it.

** ''Savage Species'' was an entire Scrappy Book of poorly-balanced concepts. It's one bookof those books almost no sensible DM will allow. For example, a ritual that lets you sacrifice levels in XP cost (that is, a level 1 template costs 1000 XP, a level 2 template costs 3000, etc) to apply ''templates'' to your character. Kobolds are bad enough, but when you factor in that the character can drop from level 6 to level 5 and pick up the Necropolitan, Half-Celestial and Weretiger templates without much hassle, maintaining balance in a party becomes pretty much impossible.

** For the record, that is called ''Priority''. This was even lampshaded in the anime, where Jonouchi questioned the idea of "last equals first". And as of March 19, 2011 (now etched in history as [[Yu-Gi-Oh Ze Xal|the Exceed Rule Patch]]), this is now abolished and the ''Trap Hole'' cards regain their power of eliminating big threat monsters like Judgment Dragon and Dark Armed Dragon.

* ''[[Exalted]]'' had the Reactor/Perfect Spam/Lethality/Paranoia Combat/Overwhelming issue, which was a whole ''bunch'' of these. Elaborated: Reactor meant that with relentless stunting and mote regeneration Charms it was comparatively easy to come out of any given action with more motes of Essence and more Willpower than you started. These motes and WP were then spent to activate "paranoia combos", which were massive experience sinks containing every single [[NoWon't SellWork On Me]] power that could be accessed, including perfect defences. If you didn't activate your paranoia combo, you would die because of a preponderance of unpleasant "bad touch" effects, which would kill you, cut off your arms, turn you into a ferret, or otherwise make your life very difficult, not helped by the low health levels of these ''titan-killing god-kings'', which ensured that even if there weren't any bad-touch effects in the oncoming attack, it would still deal quite a lot of harm if it got through your overpriced armour. Overwhelming damage and Essence Ping ensured that armour was [[Armour Is Useless|largely unhelpful]]. Notably, the 2.5 errata tried to kill ''almost all of these''; combos became free, mote regeneration was nerfed in the head, stunt regen was dropped to once per action, Essence ping was killed, Overwhelming became far weaker, and armour got cheaper. More abstractly, some players dislike Charms, believing them to be either annoying, too limiting, or overemphasised, and attunement motes in the 2.5 errata were liked by exactly nobody, but the lethality/paranoia issue was the most widely complained about and the source of many fixes.

** Also in the "Mannconomy" was the addition of crates and keys. With the random drop system, sometimes you will recieve a crate instead of a weapon (or paint/name tag/hat). You need a key to get whats inside the crate, but these keys have to be BROUGHT WITH REAL MONEY! And when you do open the crate you may get a hat, or a very rare unusaul hat... but more likely to get a regular weapon that could have been dropped instead of the crate to begin with!

* ''[[Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine|Warhammer 40000 Space Marine]]'' multiplayer disables the text chat when one is dead and waiting for respawn. This despite the game being one of fast-paced action, when those moments are the only ones when you have, you know, ''time'' to type anything.

== Turn-Based Strategy ==

** ''[[Fire Emblem Jugdral|Fire Emblem: Thracia 776]]'', apart from being [[Nintendo Hard|one of the hardest games in the series]], suffers from a fair share of Scrappy Mechanics. The Dismounting feature is the most prominent. Intended as a [[Nerf]] for mounted units as it made them fight on foot using swords during indoor levels. However it only ended up hurting Lance Knights and Axe Knights who were forced to illogically use swords when they dismounted rather then the weapons they trained their entire lives with. Worst of all, the player army was left with no indoor Lance users, keep in mind the final chapter took place indoors, and Lances were pretty much [[Vendor Trash]].

*** Many players likeslike the [[Non-Lethal KO|Capturing System]], claiming it added a new layer of depth to the series. It has one incredibly aggrivating problem though.: Units who can't fight are automatically captured. Normally this makes sense, after all, - it saves you viewing an [[Overly-Long Fighting Animation]] when you know how the fight's going to turn out, but it also means your healers will be captured ''if an enemy so much as touches them''. Sure, you can get them back by killing the captor, but they still will have swiped ''the healer's entire inventory, staves included''. Worse still, a knowledgeable player will find this ''massively'' Longabusable storysince shortan enemy won't kill units they can capture this way, and enemies who have captured an ally suffer the substantial penalties for holding a units. This makes it a trivial matter to let an otherwise dangerous enemy socapture machan asally toucheswith youran healer,empty youinventory losethen allkick their stavesass as they're weighed down, rescuing the captured ally. It's even possible to win what's intended as a [[Hopeless Boss Fight]] this way!

** Status effects.* In this game, they[[Standard Status Effects]] last ''for the entire chapter'' unless cured., (Andand status healing staves are in VERY''very'' short supply). It's Especiallyespecially annoying since [[Religion of Evil|Dark Mages]] are very common enemies, and the standard dark spell inflicts poison. Worse- still,[[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|poison that isn't accessible when you later recruit a Dark Mage of your own, [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|his magic DOESN'T inflict poison]]!!]] Oh, and sleeping characters can be one-touch captured as above.

*** And finally, healing staves can miss. In a game where [[Nintendo Hard|you're going to need all the healing you can get!]]

** ''[[Fire Emblem Akaneia|Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon]]'' earned a [[Internet Backdraft|a ''lot'']] of ire online]] by forcing you to ''kill off your own characters'' in order to unlock sidequest chapters, as it went against practically everything the series stood for to fans - particularly, that the possibility of a [[Final Death|every]] made most players [[Video Game Caring Potential|thingcare enough about the characters]] to loathe the seriesthought stoodof forletting them die, much less ''doing so intentionally''. It didn't help that most of the characters you got out of said sidequests were [[Tier-Induced Scrappy|fairly useless.]].

*** The reclass system is something of a [[Base Breaker]]. Some think it adds an element of customisability to your army, while others think it [[Completley Missing The Point|Completley Misses the Point]] of every character being unique.

* "Dealer Qualifying" rules in certain casino games based on Stud Poker. How it works: If the Dealer's hand is not strong enough, (i.e. below an Ace high with a king in Caribbean Stud), all players automatically win their ante bets and their play bets are returned to them. However, antes only pay even money, whilst Play Bets, if they beat the dealer, have increased payouts for better hands. the dealer qualification rule is the Casino's ticket out of paying these higher wins. (as opposed to determainingdetermining their mathamaticalmathematical edge by simply altering the payouts). Some games, like Three Card Poker, compensate by paying bonuses on the ante bets as well even if the hand loses, but the bonus is still not as large as the bonus on a play bet.

[[Category:ScrappyError MechanicIndex]]