Yes, this game has enough examples for its own page.
- PVP Armory bonuses, to the point of turning PVP since Season 6 from "whoever has the best team wins" into "whoever has the biggest Attack/Defense bonuses wins".
- Many a player would want to tear their hair out over the game's prize roulette, especially with the daily reward turned into another roulette game. In other words, get used to getting a lot of meager prizes like one measly Command Point or various field supplies that you probably don't neednote . Even if there are 3 main prizes, the cursor likes to stop just beside a top prize just to tease you.
- The rewards for Incursion fights, while not involving a roulette, are just as infuriating, especially with the high chance of getting an outmoded and useless PvP armory item or PvP challenge tokens over a very small chance to get the desired weapon instead.note
- With the advent of Daily Missions (a series of missions that change every day), the prize roulette has become even more frustrating than ever, especially on days that offer a chance at Limited Edition weapons. There, the chance of getting the most underwhelming prize possible over a weapon is far greater than usual. One roulette has 8 E-ISO and 1 consumable, and the cursor is most likely to stop on the latter most of the time.
- Lockbox collections. The idea of recruiting an exclusive hero is nothing short of a gambling mechanic, relying on pure luck to obtain the hero with the least amount of boxes opened. Forums are even rife with debate about statistical and probability equations on how many boxes are required to get the desired chance of completing the set. Buying more boxes with gold makes the hero even more costly than the regular heroes which require less using the current gold/command point exchange rate. Then there is also a chance that you can wind up getting a duplicate comic book covernote , making it a Scrappy Mechanic in a Scrappy Mechanic.
- Season 8 of PVP introduces a type of lockbox that can only be gained by winning five daily matches in PVP, the PVP daily roulette (which requires winning those five matches), or paying for them in gold. Given the aforementioned frustration caused by armory bonuses and prize roulettes, this manages to combine all three of these Scrappy Mechanics into one!
- SpecOps 14 introduced the "Bonus Bar", Playdom's attempt to ease the players' beef with the mechanic: getting duplicate comic book covers will fill up the bar, which will ensure that the next cover will NOT be a duplicate.
- PVP Season 9 introduces the PVP tasks, which requires players to collect PVP roulette rewards in order to attain an overpowered item blueprint. Said PVP rewards can be bought for a hefty sum of gold and the blueprint can't be achieved outside PVP. Also, the revamped PVP rating reward system may or may not be in your favor.
- When you combine characters with huge wings (like Angel and Phoenix Five Phoenix) with front line placement and the fact that they rise and fall in place, you get an annoyance that can end up blocking you from selecting your intended target if you're not careful.
- Targeting can be done by clicking on the portraits at the top edge or names at the bottom of the screen, though it doesn't change how annoying things look.
- New features like Incursions (with the randomness of what opponents you'll face) and Heroic Battles (Trick Boss and Luck-Based Mission battles, sometimes a combination of both) are nothing compared to the true padding in getting 100% Completion for Season 2: recruiting heroes. SpecOps and PVP heroes, the most expensive of them allnote , are involved, with in-game roles both big and small. It's not like anyone (even the players who'd been there since the game's conception) would have these heroes at the start, especially the PVP heroes. Completing Season 1 seems trivial in comparison.
- CovertOps heroes, which looked like mini-SpecOps events but turned out to be Double Unlock. Finishing these quests unlocks each of these heroes for purchase, instead of simply being unlocked, period.
- Cower. Like Incapacitation, it has a 20% chance to cause the opponent to miss their turn. However, unlike Incapacitation, it doesn't give you a stun-free turn to recover, so you can lose a long string of turns thanks to the higher proc rates on PVP.
- Disoriented, causing your single-target attacks to hit an ally.
- Stun, causing you to lose your turn.
- Depower, causing offensive actions to no longer apply statuses. In a game where status effects and passives are critical to survive, it's easy to see why this counts.
- Grinding for command points, as you're more likely to get junk items instead.
- If you lose your Agent, you may not use items for the rest of the fight.
- Mystic Shroud, preventing debuffs, becomes this in Incursions and PvP.
- Being afflicted with Hexed causes your attacks to miss and damage you instead.
- Unstable Iso-8 points are very limited. Due to the gift limit of 50 gifts a day, you can only accept up to 50 of them without getting more allies.
- Pestilence!Beast. The sole reason? His passive, "Paradise Lost", which prevents debuffs from being prevented or removed. Pair him up with a weapon (such as Ex Oblivione) or character that causes a huge number of them, and battles will quickly turn from fun to completely irritating.
- Requiring gold to buy items. You only get 1 free gold per level-up.
- The time-consuming nature of training one hero at a time. This will quickly turn into a full-time job.
- The Mindless Ones' "Abyssal Stare" move, which inflicts Stare of the Abyss on you or your ally. Said debuff drastically damages your character when their turn comes up, and can even stack multiple times for major damage.
- PvP-wise, Stun and Incapacitation are the AI's trump card. If an AI party member places this AOE debuff on your team, it's a high chance your entire team will happily skip their next turn and get themselves clobbered.
- Grey Gargoyle's petrification debuffs, which cannot be removed or prevented.
