Scrappy Mechanic / World of Warcraft

Since 2004, World of Warcraft introduced some game mechanics that turned out to be Scrappy Mechanics.

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Scrappy Mechanics introduced in Classic

• Daze, a debuff that's present on everything in the game within minimal level range that dismounts and slows you if you're attacked from behind, it can make "Short jaunt through this area" into "Will you stop knocking me off my horse?!" Due to Hitbox Dissonance, you may get dazed even if the mob didn't directly hit your character. Of the Mount Equipment available for use, it's the Comfortable Rider's Barding created from Leatherworking that's become the only one worth using as a means to prevent this mechanic from happening in the first place in PvE environments (without the risk of being superceded like the Light-Step Hoofplates from Crusader's Aura, for example).
• Inventory has been an ongoing problem with MMORPGs - and this game is no exception. Over your adventure, players will pick up loads of items that will take up space in your inventory. While you can indeed expand it (and it grows every expansion), it never feels as if you ever have enough space. This is especially true if you bother with crafting and gathering - since these are murder on your inventory space. (Items such as equipment do not stack)
• You cast, you wait, you hook, you catch... it's fishing. And it's even more tedious than in real life. It's SO tedious, people will pay other people to do it for them.
  • Blizzard has given players fishing recipes and varied the fish you can catch and made it easier but you still spend hours upon end staring at a bobber because you must actively click on the bobber to catch a fish. A catch takes up to 20 seconds. It lacks the as-you-go ease of skills like First Aid and Skinning, the speed and travel value of something like Herbalism or Mining, the excellent buffs of Cooking, and even the entertaining lore value and XP gain of Archaeology. Plus anybody can do it, so it's not even that profitable in the Auction House. But it has achievements, so you have to do it sometime.
• "(Insert mob name here) attempts to run away in fear!" Presumably this was done as a way of teaching players to use their snaring abilities such as the warrior's Hamstring, but it's quite an annoying mechanic to those who don't yet have access to such abilities.
• Weapon skill. It added nothing to the game except ensuring that if you swapped weapon type after using the same one for a while you had to go grind enemies slowly until you could actually fight again. This might be excusable if there were any difference between say an axe and a mace, but for almost everyone (rogues need to have a dagger to backstab) there was no difference to what you actually did. It was eventually removed in Cataclysm.
• Pet Happiness and ammunition for Hunters. For the first, hunters had to feed their pet every once in awhile, or said pet would begin doing less damage, forcing the Hunter to dedicate a number of inventory spaces for food to serve this purpose; even worse was that certain pets (Gorillas and Tortoises, I'm looking at you) had exotic diets that required any players that owned them to go out of their way just to get food that their pets would actually eat. As for ammunition, hunters had to buy bullets to fire shots, pretty much their only worthwhile way of doing damage, meaning that they were the only class who had to constantly spend gold just to be able to fight anything. They also generally had to waste a bag slot on a specialized bag to hold said ammunition. This is another example of this trope that was eventually removed in Cataclysm.
• Soul Shards for Warlocks. These items were needed for most of a Warlock's more important spells, and could only be obtained one at a time by channeling a certain spell on an enemy that granted XP or Honor Points as it died. Even worse, they didn't stack at all. Most warlocks had to dedicate an entire bag worth of space just to holding these, and some even more than that. Fortunately, this was yet another mechanic that was dropped in Cataclysm.
• The original Paladin blessings were a ghastly example of busywork, as they lasted 5 minutes - shorter than many single fights. Combine this with the 40 person raids, and you can see how much fun Paladins used to have making sure that everyone was buffed with the blessing they wanted. Various attempts to make this system less annoying were tried (most notably, turning them into longer-lasting buffs that could be cast on an entire group) until eventually they just removed all but two types and made it work like everyone else's long-term buffs.
• One of the most hated mechanics in the game would probably be the Deserter debuff. To get this, you have to either be totally inactive during a battleground, or manually leave before it's over. If you get this, it'll force you to wait 15 or 30 minutes (depending on what Blizzard feels like this patch) to queue for another one. This, in theory, will stop players from just leaving a battleground when they don't like how it's going and just requeuing for another one, or just hanging back and doing nothing to rack up honor points. In theory...because this is usually not how you get it. The usual cause will be a person in your battleground group, usually one of the less desirable types of players, reporting you as being AFK just because, or because your internet failed and you couldn't move. It results in you getting a debuff called Inactive. If you wait too long, you'll automatically get Deserter, even if you're still in the battleground. If you get to this point, there's no stopping it. Even if you meet the requirements to get rid of them (getting into a fight or some other kind of PVP action), you'll still be kicked out a lot of the time.
  • In Patch 3.3.0 of Wrath of the Lich King, when the Group Finder was first added, it introduced the Dungeon Deserter debuff. Much like its PVP counterpart, the problem isn't how Dungeon Deserter was implemented. It's due to how it can easily be misused by trolls to vote kick party members that they don't like and give them the Dungeon Deserter debuff.
• The old honor system. There was a limited amount of players who could get the higher titles, and honor decayed quickly. To get the top title you'd have to grind battlegrounds non-stop for months, and taking a break for even one day would set you back a lot.
• Knockback effects have been the bane of many players. It causes your character to be flung in midair, interrupting your spellcast for casters and often knocking melee and ranged out of range. This is especially deadly when you're trying to, say, heal a character and that character dies because you were flung across the room from a knockback effect. One daily quest during Brewfest uses this mechanic and it's often irritating to do because the drills containing the dark iron dwarves randomly appear and throws your character halfway across the action. It requires a lot of luck and cooperation from other players to unlock a daily quest.

Scrappy Mechanics introduced in expansion packs

• A perfect example would be the Wrath of the Lich King expansion's Heroic or Hard Mode system, which separated all raid content into Heroic/Regular varieties, giving each variety its own separate lockout, and then separating FURTHER into 10-man/25-man varieties, meaning each active raiding guild could hit all relevant raiding content four times per week, once 10, once 25, once 10 hm, once 25 hm. The exact same content slogged through four times each week. The raid that started using this new system, Trial of The Crusader/Trial of the Grand Crusader, had raid rewards based not only on individual boss-kill drops, but also on special tokens garnered per boss-kill (Trophies of the Crusade and Emblems of Triumph) on top of other drops that could benefit guilds like Crusader orbs and crafting recipes. All of this meant that ,in order to remain competitive, each guild was not so much allowed to hit this content four times per week as forced to. There are no words for how tedious and hated this system was, as it caused content to become old and tiresome four times as quickly and was, thankfully, phased out with the release of Icecrown Citadel. Tellingly, when Wrath of the Lich King classic re-released Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader, the devs made the lockout system work the same way as it was in ICC in order to prevent guilds from having to clear the same raid four times per week as it was the case in 2009.
• Tenacity in Wintergrasp earned ire on both sides of the fence. The faction with the fewest players in the battle would receive a scaling bonus buff, increasing health and damage done. It succeeded only in prolonging individual fights, as the overall battle relied heavily on point-capture mechanics. On servers with high population imbalances, every point could easily be captured and held by the dominant faction, regardless of Tenacity.
• Hello Archaeology profession. Everyone hates you. Fortunately, it's entirely optional. It was initially supposed to tie into a variety of side quests and player buffs based on reverence for particular titans associated with the ruins in question, but that got Dummied Out, leaving only the surface element behind. This profession was retired after Battle of Azeroth, but remains in the game.
• In order to enter the Zul'Aman dungeon, players have to hit a gong at the exact same moment as an NPC. If they mess up too many times, said NPC slowly walks back to his starting area and players have to start all over.
• The original Raid Finder looting system. Players who could use an item could roll Need on it, even if they didn't actually need it. This resulted in abuse of the system where players from the same guild would roll on loot for one another and trade what they received to whoever needed it.
  • The updated Raid Finder and charms looting system. In Raid Finder and Flexible Raid the game does an off-screen roll that determines whether the player receives gold or an item from the boss' loot table, which can be repeated by spending one charm. The chance of receiving an item is relatively low and it is entirely possible to receive a duplicate or inferior version of an item the player already has, which has led to some hate despite it being more efficient and fair than the old system.
  • This loot system was added into 5-Man Dungeons in Warlords of Draenor and Legion with many players complaining about going through multiple dungeons and receiving no drops. What's worse is that the "consolation prize" is an insultingly tiny amount of gold. This is made even worse if you're farming for a particular item for Transmogrification, and have to not only hope you get an item (which is an even lower chance) but that it will also be the particular item that you're looking for out of the six that can potentially drop.
• Daily quests required for content and reputations. Daily quests are viewed primarily as busy work and making them the only route to unlock high-end game content and rewards from factions makes them even more reviled. Blizzard removed the 25 per day cap on them in Pandaria, which led to people hitting all the reputation dailies to quickly grind reputation and hating them even more.
  • Daily Quests have gained an increasing amount of hatred during the Mists of Pandaria era. Blizzard dropped the Equip Faction Tabard mechanic from the previous Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions where players would gain reputation for specific factions by having their tabards equipped in dungeons and gain reputation whenever enemies or bosses are killed. The reason is because the fanbase found this too easy to reap the end faction rewards so Blizzard dropped the faction tabards entirely in favor of forcing players into completing nothing but daily quests for faction reputation. It's extremely time consuming and fans nowadays are wishing for alternatives to gain reputation, including the return of faction tabards.
  • One of the worst parts of the daily quest grind was the fact that, for a long time, the daily quests for certain factions were gated behind the daily quests for the Golden Lotus. In other words, it was impossible (or at least, virtually impossible) to grind rep for, say, the August Celestials until you got at least Revered with the Golden Lotus. Even those players who didn't have a problem with daily quests in general did have a specific hatred for the Golden Lotus, generally because the Golden Lotus was in the way of the faction they actually wanted to build reputation with.
• The Shipyard in Warlords of Draenor is on the surface just a slightly different version of the Garrison and its follower minions. The two real problems come from first having such a low cap on how many ships a player can have that they have to regularly swap out a ship's equipment to improve odds of succeeding on a mission, which destroys the not inexpensive equipment the ship already has. Second, the ships can be destroyed, which means new ones have to be built and trained up all over again. Meanwhile the cap for regular followers is over twice as high, allowing characters more options for each mission, and if they fail there's no consequences beyond having to wait for the mission to come up again to try.
  • An extra layer of annoyance on top of that was the fact that the race of the ship's crew gives a unique bonus. Some of these bonuses are useless or redundant, such as having a chance to recover ship equipment versus a flat increase to success chance. But the crew is randomly chosen on creating the ship and cannot be changed. The only way to get a better crew is to destroy the ship, build a new one at full price, wait the required hour, and hope RNG lines up next time.
• Legendary items in Legion have three different scrappy complaints against them. First, the method of acquiring a legendary is nothing more than grinding a series of activities for rewards that might include a legendary. Thankfully each time without a legendary being awarded increases the chance of receiving one, but it's still a significant slog. Second, the legendary received is random. Each class has legendaries that are undesirable and receiving them is seen as a waste. Third, the right set of legendaries is nearly required to be competitive in the end-game. Many players can go months without ever obtaining the legendary they need, resulting in their performance lagging behind others regardless of their skill level.
• Upgrading Cooking recipes in Legion has earned the character Nomi much hatred and mockery. Nomi takes work orders to research recipes based on cooking ingredients but has a very low chance of actually producing a recipe. Instead he takes perfectly good ingredients and reduces them to vendor trash, though later patches allow him to sometimes return some of the ingredients instead. Given each work order takes four hours, he reduces 30 usable items into worthless trash in a single day.
• Suramar is a densely-populated hostile city and the site of the last major storylines in Legion prior to patches. Players receive an ability that disguises them as Nightborne, so they can freely move around and pursue their quests. However a large number of guards in the city have a detection ability; if the player enters a certain distance they will begin a cast and remove the disguise, and if caught off-guard it's nearly impossible to escape the effect radius. Early on this could easily kill a player as the high mob density would lead to them being swarmed. Even after this was no longer a threat, being forced into combat is still deeply annoying. However the biggest complaint is the limited choice of obnoxious comments shouted as the spell casts.
• Azerite gear and the traits involved is widely disliked for two major reasons. The first is that the effectiveness of any given piece of gear depends on whether any of the traits available are desirable for the player, since while the ability to pick a trait for each tier gives players choice, the need to optimize means there's usually only a few viable traits, which may not be available. The second is that in order to unlock said traits, you need your Heart of Azeroth to be at a certain level, with better pieces of gear having steeper requirements, resulting in you having to grind for Azerite.
• Although the ire tends to be directed towards the players rather than the mechanic, the Armored Vaultbot rare in Mechagon counts. It can be opened in two ways — either with a key which the players can create, or by kiting it to an electromagnet a not-so-short distance away. It cannot be killed through normal means as it just regenerates health almost instantly. The issue arises with the kiting process, as there tends to be at least one hunter or warlock who's either new to the process or just inattentive enough to leave taunt on their pet, meaning that until they listen to the complaints from everyone else the Vaultbot just stays in one place attacking that pet.
• Titanforging (or Warforging and Thunderforging in previous tiers), which gave gear a slim chance of going up several item levels at random, was widely derided for years by players who felt it invalidated gear progression and had a chance of giving better gear to inattentive players over ones who were more deserving.
  • Corrupted gear was introduced as a temporary replacement for Titanforging. Items had a chance of spawning with a Corrupted affix which granted either a passive stat boost or a powerful proc ability. The system was based on risk vs. reward gameplay as the gear also applied Corruption to the player, which caused effects that became increasingly dangerous as the Corruption level rose. The Corruption effects have had a mixed response but the imbalance of certain Corrupted items has resulted in worse. Certain Corrupted items had the potential to increase a player's DPS output by a third or more, which is more than enough for a low ranking DPS to suddenly shoot to top DPS.
    • To help players, there were two ways of countering the corruption: Ashjra'kamas, Shroud of Resolve, a cloak that granted corruption resistance, and Titanic Purification, which removes the corruption entirely but also removes the benefit the corruption gave. However, to access them, the player needs to work through the 8.3 storyline, while corrupted gear started appearing as soon as 8.3 launched, instead of waiting for the point in the story where the player is introduced to the corruption system. Running the storyline once isn't too bad, but for players with lots of alts, that means grinding though the same story for each alt to counter the corruption on items they've been collecting since the patch dropped. For those players, the choice isn't of whether or not to use the corrupted gear, but whether to sell or scrap the gear.
• Great Worms from Beyond are giant serpents that fly in the skies of Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms during Assaults. When flown too close to them, they'll inflict a stacking debuff that lowers your flying mount speed until you can't move at all, forcing players to fly low to stay out of their range, and even then they're still fairly difficult to completely avoid. They seem to have been created to force players to be within combat range of other players in War Mode and prevent them from simply AFKing while flying high enough to avoid being dismounted by another player's Net-o-Matic 5000, the problem being that they're a nuisance for players outside of War Mode, as well.
• Horrific Visions are already a contentious feature, but out of all the Madnesses you can be afflicted with, Leaden Foot gets the most ire. Being slowed down by it during combat can be a death sentence and it contradicts one of the mechanics of Umbric's fight in Stormwind, where you have to walk over to him while dodging ice projectiles. Complaints were bad enough that the severity of the slow was nerfed with the July 14, 2020 reset. The only other Madness that comes close is Split Personality, which was nerfed in the same reset and is hated more for just being obnoxious, but at the very least that one has a very blatant visual cue so you can prepare and react accordingly.
• The Covenant feature has been subject to this as well. While Covenants offer a whole load of cosmetics and game-changing benefits, it has been the subject of anger due to a variety of factors:
  • First, it features classes and different Covenant choices that are ideal. For example, if you play X spec of one class, it's entirely possible that, going from spec to spec, to have a entirely different Covenant choice as the best one. This leads to a lot of scorn because you are unable to play each of your specs at their maximum potential because what's the best choice for one spec is a bad or only average one for the other. Meanwhile, people who dislike a specific Covenant (or want to pick a different one) may be forced to select it because it's the best performer (woe to any druid who decides to roll any other Covenant than Night Fae, whose active ability (Convoke the Spirits) is deemed a must-have), with entire specs doing upwards of 30% more damage in one Covenant compared to others who picked a different Covenant but have the same gear. It has been held as a prime example of Shadowlands' obsession with loads of systems in place backfiring spectacularly. One noticeable aspect of the changes to the talent tree system in Dragonflight are certain talents that originated from these Covenants being available via the base or specialized talent trees, as a means to remedy this suddenly important choice and its consequences.
  • Second, it causes issues for players aiming at 100% Completion of cosmetics (pets, mounts, and armor sets) as it forces them to level an alt and play them actively in order to get the cosmetic they are after. And even then, some Covenant cosmetics are locked behind even more requisites in order to be able to obtain them; the best example has to be Tahonta, where the Necrolord in question needs to be level 60, invest 7k anima in upgrading the Abomination Factory to level 2, and then find a very specific construct and build it, then have it with you when you kill the rare, all to be eligible for a very low drop chance.
  • Third, if you choose the wrong Covenant or just changed your mind, you have to go through a tedious process to switch Covenant that's only possible to do once a week, not to mention none of the story campaign, renown or adventurers carry over, so you have to pretty much start from scratch if you swap Covenants.
• The 9.1 Sanctum of Domination raid introduced Domination Sockets and Gems, mostly intended as a substitute for the widely-requested tier set bonuses. It quickly became apparent that it had the exact same problems as Corruption: gear with Domination Sockets was substantially more valuable than those without it (requiring some specs to reforge their Legendary item to a different slot to avoid a conflict), the impact of Domination Gems was great enough that players who were lucky to have one drop were immediately more useful than those without, and the Gems could only be upgraded through a grindy process. The subsequent major content patch disabled all Domination Sockets and reintroduced proper tier sets and bonuses.
• A major source of complaints in Shadowlands are the world quests. Not the quests themselves, but rather the fact they have multiple hidden steps to do them. Several especially bad offenders will suddenly have 4 to five times as many steps compared to what was originally displayed to complete, turning what looked like a 2 mins world quest into one that drags for 10 mins or possibly even longer. This world quests were so poorly received that post-launch zones do not feature world quests that list hidden steps, instead having the actual steps displayed from the get-go.
• Reaching level 60 beginning in Shadowlands unlocks various things such as World Quests, being able to skip story segments if they've been done on a previous character, and is a prerequisite to continuing other story segments. It also renders other elements as Permanently Missable Content; Chromie Time, the EXP Eliminator, and being able to queue up for certain non-current dungeons via the group finderas a result of Chromie Time cannot be used on level 60/61 characters, despite story segments from Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands requiring this prerequisite. As a result, it is impossible to use the group finder to get some help on the Spire of Ascension in Shadowlands despite the Kyrian storyline necessitating a run of the dungeon in its Covenant campaign.
• The Dracthyr race, introduced in Dragonflight, is widely criticized for having unusual restrictions on transmog. For Dracthyr in their normal draconic form, only the equipped shoulders, belt, and tabard are visible, which makes it difficult to create a unique style. Additionally, while their Visage form does have normal options, it cannot be transmogged separately and risks having ill-fitting items if trying to accommodate for both forms.
• Fyrakk's assault in the second season of Dragonflight is a world event that takes place in the Ohn'ahran Plains and Azure Span where players must fight a group of Primalists in a given zone, constantly under fire from the enemy. The big issue is that Fyrakk himself will periodically scorch the entire region in fire, causing massive damage over time to the area he's flying over. Anyone casually trying to do quests in the area are in for a rude awakening. The assault itself doesn't pay much outside of Whelpling Shadowflame Crests, a low-tier upgrade resource that can already be obtained in abundance via other world quests. The result is That One Level that pays poorly for all the effort needed to complete its missions.
• The Evoker legendary, Nasz'uro, introduced during the Aberrus raid, became a source of endless frustration. After the first Mythic kill of Sarkareth, the Cracked Titan Gem could then randomly drop from a Sarkareth kill on any difficulty, but the drop rates were very unclear. Blizzard stepped in to clarify that a) you only needed to kill Sarkareth on the highest difficulty possible and b) there is a "bad luck protection" ensuring that you will eventually get it if you keep accumulating kills. None of this was communicated in game, and players were still skeptical if it actually worked. To add insult to injury, once you get the Cracked Titan Gem, the Evoker needs to spend hundreds of thousands of gold to craft it.
  • This got worse in the subsequent Amirdrassil raid with the new 2H Strength Axe, Fyr'alath. The only change Blizzard made in response to the feedback is to make the bad luck protection more explicit in game with the Greater Ember of Fyr'alath drops from Fyrakk in the event the quest start item fails to drop. Unlike Nasz'uro, Fyr'alath is a much more significant damage boost, and all classes who could use the 2H Axe were undertuned for the season, leading many to speculate that the classes were turned around the legendary that still had a low drop rate.