Asklemmy

League of Legends

My dumbass ex-brother-in-law is deep in the process of losing his wife and two kids largely because of his EVE Online addiction.

Skyrim. The writing is horrible, I can't remember the name and personalities of more than 5 NPCs, the town's are microscopic, it can't handle more than 5 NPCs on screen, all the dungeons are theme park rides with gift shop exits, combat is a horrific sloppy mess, it's ugly, it has 4 voice actors, it's a buggy mess despite being released 37 times, the only way to interact with the world is violence, and all of the quests are flaccid boring murderfests.

I've played hundreds of hours.

Fucking Ark. I have a major love-hate relationship with that game.
This review visualizes it well.

It makes me sad to say it now because I used to love it so much, but Destiny.

It’s just a micro-transaction shadow of its former self now.

Call of Duty. And any other game that makes you pay more money (after you've already paid for the game) for loot boxes that are basically gambling for kids.

I can't stand the state of modern games. They arrive broken, have pay-to-win models, and promote an unhealthy dopamine cycle of gambling and addiction.

Cookie Clicker

like drugs... just say no

I played a shit ton of WoW when I was younger. It stopped being fun a long time ago. Mostly it was only fun with friends.

D3 also sucks. Played a lot of that at launch, and also when the expansion came out (can’t remember the name). D2 was always way better, and now with D2R, I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy another game in my life.

Genshin. Sucks really, and I felt that after I quit the game, looking back, I never had fun at all.

Sim City for GameBoy. If you're thinking, "how the heck would you play Sim City on a GameBoy?" Exactly, don't do it. Young me wanted to like it, but just spare yourself...

League of Legends.

I had some fun at the beginning but soon realized that this game just is way too complicated. I don't want to study a game and watch dozens of YouTube tutorials just to be at an average "not really bad" level. And my friends tried to convince me to play over and over again and I joined them without actually having any fun at all. Will never play this dogshit game again.

Elite: Dangerous.

If you want to enjoy it, you need to go in with lowered expectations and a certain frame of mine, lest you go mad grinding materials.

Idleon - The Idle MMO. The dev billed himself as a non-predatory mobile dev; premium currency could be reasonably earned for free. I was happy to support the dev by buying seasonal bundles. Then he started adding stuff that had to be purchased directly with money. Then he implemented FOMO with rotating bonuses. This guy makes millions a year and rants on Twitch streams about having to pay too much taxes.

Recently, he added a gacha system with a separate premium currency that cannot be earned for free so that the very few players who are running a hacked version of the game can't pull the best equipment. F2P players get one pull a week and will statistically likely pull the best bonus in 1-3 years, but there are already plans to add more bonuses and rotate out existing ones.

This was right after another controversial incident when many players exploited an infinite currency bug which was predicted and could have been removed well in advance. Historically, the attitude was "you guys had your fun" and he removes the bug with no punishment to players. This time, he went into full meltdown mode, posting walls of text on discord with screenshots of Steam reviews that hurt his feelings, then reset a bunch of exploiters' skill - not just rolled back but reset to remove months of progress.

He's recently removed a statement from the Steam page that stated mobile game developers don't have to be predatory, so at least he's self aware I guess? Steam reviews were very positive; recent reviews are mostly negative. He's responded by offering a concession that the best bonus is guaranteed after 200 pulls, which equates to 3.8 years if you're F2P.

I haven't quit the game yet, but I'm pretty close. My wallet is closed for sure.

The Sims 4, I have 600+ hours on it somehow, don't even bother asking me how because I also don't know how that happened. It's widely regarded as the worst one in the series as it lacks the most content, has unbelievably egregious DLCs and it's plain out fucking boring compared to older titles. If I had to guess how I've played so much I'd guess it's the CAS (character creator) and building mode which are both fantastic, the game itself is blergh at best, especially without mods.

Destiny 2. Played it religiously and got like 3k hours in it since 2018, and just stopped last year. The grind was killing me season after season and the clan I was with has disbanded, everyone is super pissy in LFGs. Great shooter, but can't do everything from zero every 3 months Bungie. Qlso the rotating meta, and the frind to get it.

Elite: Dangerous.

Hell of a good space trucker sim. If you like spending 2 hours managing your ship before making a 6 system jump only to dock and do it all over again.

I'm from Thailand. We have a term called เกมหมา (dog game) which means a shitty game that gets you raging. The list varies from person to person but every list so far includes Dota 2 and League of Legends (which I have personally played). Other honorable mentions include:

• Free Fire
• Fortnite
• PUBG
• Minecraft
• Roblox
• FIFA Online

Destiny 2.

Incredibly engaging loop, great gunplay/moment to moment gameplay, and an intriguing story that keeps me interested to see what will happen next.

Loaded with micro (and macro) transactions and time gating of reused content as the game approaches it's conclusion and Bungie prepares it's next project for launch (this project also highlighting the poor state the PvP section of the game is in.).

Again, so much of my time has been spent in Destiny 2 and a good majority of it I've personally enjoyed. But when asked this question it's my go-to answer to advise people to steer clear if possible.

Looking at my Steam, the game with the highest number of hours played, of which I would currently say unambiguously that you should avoid it, looks to be War Thunder. Among the reasons I'd tell you to stay away from it:

• It's a grindfest starting very early on.
• It's far too easy to lose as a result of what can reasonably be called bad luck.
• Unless you specialise, or throw real money at it, the fun, high-tech stuff is probably thousands of hours into the future.
• There's content gated behind "if you were not around when this was regular stuff, you will never get it"
• It calls itself an MMO, while there's nothing MMO about it. It's all instanced battles, with little to no world continuity as you progress.

Stellaris. I can't recommend it anymore due to how fragmented the game mechanics have become due to the dlc model

What I am seeing here is that mostly people regret playing free to play games. That tells me that their business model is working as intended but we should all wise up.

My regret is spending too much time making cool mods work together and then not playing the games, oblivion was the worst because I didn't get it until skyrim was a year or two old and there were so many stupid mods out already. Most of them are janky or old and have incompatibilities with each other. I discovered pretty quickly that I need less options not more in open world rpgs because I'm an adult and don't have time to play games the way my heart wants to (look in every door, under every bush, around every corner).

Thomas the Tank Engine on SNES. Me and my mates used to find it hilarious when high. Still do.

Paladins. I've spent like 400 hours in it and tbh it's all hand crafted to keep you addicted and keep grinding their bullshit battlepass.

Honorable mention: Team Fortress 2. Game is great but Valve has pretty much done nothing with it. Last major update was in late 2017 and since then the game has received minor updates that usually only add shit for people to throw money at. The game still has a bot and cheater problem due to aforementioned fuck all Valve has been doing. Feel free to play, but you better open your wallet if you even want to speak! Let that one sink in, the game is free to play but you need to pay! To! Communicate! In the fucking game! Why? Oh the aforementioned cheating/bot problem of course! The bots were spamming racial slurs and other shit so Valve in infinite wisdom made free to play players unable to communicate at all! And that didn't even do anything! The bots just had premium accounts! There are cheaters in the game with very valuable items and are not banned. After all that trash talk the game is still fun, 4000 hours well spent. It's just sad that it's being left to rot.

League of Legends. I've sank so many hours into it a few years back. It's not a bad game, just highly addictive and toxic. It was only really worth playing it with friends, but now they've all moved on.

The fact that nobody has said Escape from Tarkov yet is shocking. The desync makes you never sure if you were killed legitimately or from a cheater (of which there are plenty). You're brutally punished for every mistake, including those caused by the ever present audio issues. The developer, Nikita, will make the most nonsense changes in the name of stopping Real Money Trading, but all it does is encourage people to pay cheaters to get ahead since it gets harder to progress every wipe (the game completely wipes your progress every 6ish months). The quests are uninspired and boring at best, or sadistic at worst and encourage the worst play styles. This is honestly just a fraction of all the issues with the game.

I haven't played in probably 6-8 months and I will for sure go back because apparently I'm a masochist.

Path of Exile. You will watch a cool new budget friendly league starter guide on YouTube and follow it religiously. You will install or update half a dozen 3rd-party tools for essential QoL. You will ignore the new league mechanics until maps while speedrunning the same unskippable story for each character. You will hide most loot and avoid risky item crafting. You will pickup currency to buy your gear wholesale from other players. You will reroll your character or rq if your build has no defense or bossing damage or becomes too expensive due to popularity (Mathil effect). You will repeat this cycle in 3-4 months.

GTA 5 especially GTA online, idk how I used to grind that game constantly just to buy a cool car that I'd stop driving a few days later. It got better "recently" (2-3 years ago) with bigger payouts and single person heists but then the in game inflation fucked everything. I haven't touched the game in months because all I saw about it was how glitchy it was and how R* were removing shit that had been in the game for 10 years.

Temtem.

Extremely predatory design that tries damn hard to force you into micro transactions. And once you do, you have to spend so many hours to get what you already payed for. On top of that, the endgame is almost a completely different game with a different target audience than the rest of it. I regret all the money and time I wasted on it. Had to hide it in my steam library to get myself to stop as well. That kind of predatory shit should be illegal imo.

Stay away from that game, especially if you have any past issues with impulse, micro transactions, and/or addictive tendencies.

Warframe, Got over 2.5K hours and in-game hours show over 3K.

Used to play as much as I can as it was a game meant to be grinded, but eventually got worn out and stopped playing all of a sudden.

Tried playing it afterwards and by then the content got even more bigger that it was overwhelming to play anymore.

Sometimes I miss it but about 95% of the time I just don't feel like playing anymore.

Edit- Added hours and a Comma.

Starcraft 2 custom games, i loved custom games back in the day but right now you need to grind to get to the good stuff in most of the maps and the community is weird since most have been playing for too long and aren’t friendly to noobs.

I miss the time where i could go into a random custom game and just learn the map on the go, bot having to grind or learn the correct upgrade path.

No Man's Sky.

No, I'm not one of the fellas that fell for the hype. I didn't preorder it. I started playing around 2020, after many patches and updates, my expectations were very low. Even then, I was disappointed, because everything is half baked. I think ~10h is more than enough to see everything there is to see, then it's all pure repetition.

I still got almost 500h in it, and check in once in a while, but it's not "fun", it's just cheap comfort food.

World of tanks and it's less terrible version but ugly mobile version blitz. The company actively despises it's playerbase, and I want to play a game like it but they all give up and copy them.

Armoured warfare was fun until they turned it into a clone with co-op. War thunder is more realistic and that's cool but mostly just annoying.

I just want more tank games that are fun to play and not microtransaction driven.

Path of Exile, I loved that game and consider its high point (3.11-3.14 approx) to be the best ARPG ever made and I put a good 1200 hours into it over 2-3 years but after they kept nerfing builds and items over and over (I didn't like playing the leagues (seasons), preferred the eternal playground of standard) I was seeing my time and progress get invalidated by pointless nerfs over and over in a PVE game no less, so I had to quit playing. The company became hostile to its player base, lying about and hiding major changes to loot drops resulting in more invalidation of people's time and effort. I understand it's a free to play game but they already made the best ARPG of all time and to anyone who loves that genre this game is majorly addicting already and all they had to do was add interesting content and leave the systems they had in place alone. So I'm on to other games played more casually and more real life stuff. Fuck GGG.

I have spent far too long playing Magic Arena when it’s really just awful in pretty much every way you can imagine.

The economy is unbelievably broken because randomised packs are the only direct way you can use your gold to get cards, and they’ll almost never have the cards you need or in the quantities you need to have a halfway competitive deck.

Wildcards do allow you to choose to redeem them for specific cards, but they have to be of the same rarity as the wildcard and the mythic and especially rare wildcards you need so many of are always in short supply. Getting anything decent without spending real money requires a ton of grinding. I honestly wouldn’t even mind having to spend money if I could just buy the cards directly like in Magic Online, it’s much jankier but in my opinion better predecessor, but you can’t.

Probably the best part of the game is just the digital implementation of the game mechanics, but even there are some seriously annoying issues which come up not infrequently and can lose you games (like the autotapper for some reason valuing 1 life over keeping an extra colour of mana open for responses).

Overall it just feels like 95% of the time it’s just me grinding playing games with fast aggro decks I don’t even enjoy (I’m into control but it takes way longer to get your rewards that way). It’s just so so much worse than the paper game I love and I don’t think I would ever play it if it weren’t for the fact playing in paper is stupidly expensive for pretty much any 1v1 competitive format (commander is great and all and I have a couple decks, but it’s not my preferred format).

HA! It's funny cuz it's true! Eve is much more fun to read about than to play.

For me, it's most mobile games I've spent a large amount of time in. Recently it's Marvel SNAP. Before that it was SWGoH. These games are fun fun and they hook you but eventually you play enough to see all the levers they're using to manipulate you and it sours. I should really stop playing them... lol

Ultima Online is the only thing that I can really think of. Most things I think are garbage, were always garbage. But UO used to be so fucking awesome until EA started trying to make it more like EQ and later WoW.

Space Engineers. Hou can do lots of cool engineering things, but the venn diagram of "fun" and "bugged beyond belief" is nearly a perfect match. If it works, it is peobably boring, like the crafting system.

Clash Royale. I was in a clan that spanned multiple mobile games but I was the creator/leader for Clash Royale. The game has transitioned to P2W the last few years. I only keep it installed as a time waster and because of the clan.

I feel like all the games I've sunken more then 50 hours into have some merit tbh. I've never really been into those super grinding or janky games that seem to be the target of the comments haha.