Scrappy Mechanic / Path of Exile

• After completing Act 5, the game subtracts 30% from all your resistances^note The resistances are against fire, cold, lightning, and chaos damage. The game subtracts a flat percentage from your resistances, so if you have 50% cold resistance at the end of Act 5, you'll be reduced to 20% when you begin Act 6. Unlike the 75% upper limit for resistances, there is no lower limit, so it is possible to get negative percentages in your resistances, meaning you take extra damage from elements. After Act 10, the game subtracts another 30% from all your resistances, for a total of 60% permanent resistance reduction. If you're wondering why you suddenly start taking more damage than before, this is why. This mechanic is in place to make people pay attention to keeping their resistances up and upgrading gear as necessary. The permanent resistances decreases at the end of Acts 5 and 10 coincide with the in-game story element of killing the Big Bad Kitava each time, lending some lore to this mechanic. However, the game does not tell you that they do this outside of a small message in your chat window (which is very easy to miss if you have global chat on). If you're a new player, you'll likely never even know of this mechanic and will curse the game for its Difficulty Spike and Fake Difficulty.
• After completing the main story content, you lose 10% of your experience towards the next level every single time you die in the end-game content^note The end-game content includes the map system, the higher levels of the Lords Labyrinth ascendancy dungeon, and any delve or heist content above level 67. All other content you lose only 5% of your experience when you die. This makes trying to level up in the map system especially painful as enemies gradually get to the point where they can easily kill you, so an unlucky death can potentially set you back days. Getting to level 100 is nearly impossible for most builds, and even progressing through 90s can be tricky.
• Synthesis contained several Scrappy Mechanics at once. Decaying memory islands meant you could get stranded after a mistake, and randomly appearing new islands could suddenly block your planned path. The Synthesizer required massive effort to get even a chance at a good bonus, and gave nothing to non-crafting-oriented players. It got so bad that the developers actually came forward and apologized for how half-baked the systems were and that they would not be implemented into the core game in future leagues, at least not in their original iteration.
• Path of Exile is notable for being a free-to-play MMORPG whose devs try their hardest to make it difficult to have convenient trading options. The PC version does not have an auction house like other games of its kind; the closest thing PoE gets to having one is buying a premium stash tab and making it public to third-party trading websites (which the Microtransactions shop doesn't tell the player), and listing things to sell on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions' in-game Trade Market similarly requires a public premium stash tab. The only other options after that are spending a good chunk of time holing up in in-game chat on PC or posting and monitoring forum posts, then hoping someone bites.
• Enemy death effects. The developers state they're the only way for mobs that get killed in a single hit to actually affect the players, but some players think they're punishing builds for being good at killing enemies, and they're responsible for many deaths that seem to come out of nowhere.
• Sirus's death clouds in their first iteration. Between phases, he would summon giant clouds that floated around the arena and slowly followed the player. The player had to herd them around to get back to the boss, and after dying you could suddenly discover that the clouds had blocked the entrance, effectively making the fight Unwinnable. Needless to say, this was not received well, and eventually the clouds were changed to follow a fixed movement pattern.
• One type of Heist missions (Perception) has a unique obstacle - "observer totems" that increase alert level if they catch you nearby. They are always placed in maze-like corridors and can't be damaged until your companion comes close, so you have to either wait around each one, or rush through and hope you don't raise too much alert (meaning less treasure).
• Archnemesis modifiers may be the most controversial mechanic ever added to the game. The thought process was that magic and rare monsters proved to be too uninteresting following all the changes the game made over the previous decade, so the affixes would be replaced by the ones used in the Archnemesis league. The problem is that this change made rare monsters exponentially harder for almost nothing in return. As a league mechanic, it let players pick which modifiers they wanted to use to increase rewards and which ones they wanted to avoid. Now, these modifiers can easily end up with monsters that are considerably sturdier than the bosses in the same level with modifier combinations that may prevent your build from doing its job at all, along with their offense being buffed up to the point that they can easily One-Hit KO you (and suffer the dreaded 10% experience loss penalty if you're in end-game content). To top it all off, the rewards from these enemies are at best scaled up minimally at best as to make people question whether they drop more items at all. Within the first two weeks, GGG issued three mid-season patches to nerf Archnemesis mods across the board, though they moreso served people to wonder how the developers couldn't catch how overtuned this mechanic was just from the numbers alone despite claiming to have done "extensive testing". Also, they had to buff Headhunter because of these changes. The fact one of the highlights GGG showed for the next league was a rework for Archnemesis that these changes weren't well thought-out, only for them to nerf them again in week 1 because of how much they scaled with other league modifiers and how they were still too powerful in acts and early maps.
• Lake of Kalandra was highly anticipated thanks to its main league mechanic revolving around a lore figure tied to the game's most valuable currency, but just about everything about it failed to pan out.
  • Its main league mechanic of potentially powerful rings and amulets essentially made them a retread of Breach Rings and Talismans, items that most players already ignore.
  • All three of the reworked mechanics have been lambasted by the community:
    • A Beyond remake that gutted its experience potential and brought back Tainted currency in a greatly nerfed state, making them all but useless.
    • Yet another attempt at balancing Harvest that not only made the gardens even grindier but also removed means of crafting considered highly valuable by the community under the guise of them being "filler crafts".
    • As alluded to above: the Archnemesis rework, trying to bring back its main gimmick of monster drops being influenced by the modifiers the rare monsters have. This not only came with an astronomic nerf of loot drops across the board (one initially handwaved in a statement by the dev team as the removal of a 'historic quantity and quality multiplier for league enemies', i.e. anything considered worth actually killing) but the loot that would spring up from these enemies designated a lot of modifier combinations as literal Junk Rares, spewing out dozens of generic flasks or weapon quality currency items - if they had the decency to drop anything that any but the most lenient of loot filters would consider worth picking up, and it wasn't difficult to end up with combinations that would take most players minutes to kill even if they could one-shot the actual bosses within the same maps. The attempted justification for this drastic shift was the potential of these rares dropping dozens of Divine Orbs (which were being pushed as a replacement for Exalted Orbs - yet another change that served to baffle the community). What this resulted in was the most effective way to make currency was entering a map, checking whether it had any rares with the right collection - and order - of Archnemesis modifiers, get its health as low as possible and hire someone specialised in Magic Find to kill the monster for you.