So in whatever genre/s you can think of, is there any very common mechanic you loathe?
For me it's the base-building trope in RTSes. I cannot stand any game that has it. This is mainly because I hate having to get through the boring base building to get to the interesting fighting. This doesn't mean I can't stand any economics in my RTSes- I just prefer when they're kept separate as in Total War or X-Com.

random encounters in (j)rpg's

Quick-Time events, before someone shows up. Or, dare I say it, Yahtzee? It'll save his work.

RPG's:
-Extreme level grinding.
-10,000 people to talk to, all with useless information.
-Drudging through sewers.
-Random encounters in low level areas (Yet another reason Earthbound was awesome)

I actually can't really think of anything in genres that are common in the genre, just problems with particular games.

Actually, I don't know if this is common in FPSs, but I utterly loathe respawning enemies (no Infinity Ward, it's not a good idea). That, and the random encounters in JRPGs.

Edit: I also want to add increased 'difficulty', where the differences aren't to do with enemy intelligence, but increased health, telescopic vision & remembering player actions for enemies, and decreased health and damage output for you.

- A procrastinator

In FPS's, A lot of games like to strip you of all the weapons you've aquired thus far at some arbitrary point about midway to 3/4 of the way through the game. Some games do it several times(I'm looking at you, CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth). I loath this mechanic, as it's a cheap way of increasing challenge, and am glad FPS's are starting to move away from it.

ThaBenMan:
random encounters in (j)rpg's

Oh that's a good one! I hate them so much!

Also in some FPS where they throw in respawning enemies in certain sections when the game previously didn't respawn enemies. You waste all your ammo expecting them to eventually stop coming.

I hate those "Press a switch then go back to the previous room to see what changed" puzzles in JRPGs.
Was amazed when one showed up in Eternal Sonata.
Oh and deeply saddened >_<

x434343:
Quick-Time events, before someone shows up. Or, dare I say it, Yahtzee? It'll save his work.

I'm sick of saying this. QTE's can be a good thing when they're done right (see Shenmue and especially Shenmue II). It's not the mechanic's fault that developers have been abusing it.

I really hate counterintuitive puzzles (I'm looking at you Final Fantasy X) and tutorials--especially the long, unnecessary, unskippable kind.

Exploding barrels and crates. After all these years games still come out with groups of enemies around a shiny red barrel. And games often seem to exist in an alternate universe where large wooden shipping crates just happen to be around every corner, no matter the location.

The old cluster of enemies around an explosive barrel gag will never get old for me. :D

Mines, in any kind of shooter. Or player-placeable turrets. The latter not as nessescarily annoying, but sometimes people can be douches putting them inside walls or glitches. (See 'Team Fortress 2 Greif'. I know it was in fun, but I still don't like it.)

Fed-ex missions. Anytime you have to take some stupid thing from one place to another to fill time. Timed ones are worse.

On another note, I don't really mind quicktime events. But then again I liked Shenmue, which was almost entirely quicktime events and chatting with NPCs forever.

Timers in general. +1 if the number of minutes displayed is lower than 2 minutes and +2 if you have to fight against enemies.
Imagine you are in a base that is about to self-destruct and you have to escape gunning down over-armored soldiers armed with miniguns... It's exasperating to die over and over again trying to reach the exit.

Death is a commonly occurring annoyance.

Furthermore, enemies attacking you during the countdown doesn't make sense. If the base is about to explode, why are the soldiers wasting time attacking you and not running for their lives like rational people (e.g. you) would do?

QTE's are ok when you know they are coming or that they play a big part of the game play experience. Shenmue got this perfectly right as you could sense than a choreographed fight was about to kick off or that a chase was about to commence. It didn't punish you too much when you screwed up either, just setting you back to the start of the scene.

QTE's aren't ok when they pop up out of nowhere in the middle of an overly long cut scene with no prior warning. Most recently No More Heroes wanted me to press the 'z' button at the end of a boss fight. I couldn't even tell you where said button was without looking at a controller. Because I failed it put me right back to the start of the boss fight. That's just unfair.

Personally I want QTE's banned.

So the interesting question, is who actually does like these mechanics? At some point the developers on final fantasy programmed random attacks for every x number of second that you spend wadding through the long grass, and some people didn't dismiss the game as a pile of sh*t as a result. How could anyone acctually think its a good idea?

Whew, where to begin on annoying mechanics...

Red barrels are definitely somewhere on the side of tasteless these days. As are 90 degree handbrake turns and scoring points (Kudos) for skids, and not the kind in your pants.

RTS are my biggest irk however, base-building is fine, it gives you some weakness and at the same time a defensive perimiter that you can fortify and use as some kind of personal objective. What really gets me however is resource management and population caps. Oh the amount of times in DoW:DC I've suicide rushed with Necron Warriors only to have them all die so I can just build more than resurrect the existing corpses (broken bits?) for an army that far outstrips the piffling population cap. Bring back the days of Cossacks and ludicrous amounts of troops!

Lvl 64 Klutz:
RPG's:
-Extreme level grinding.
-10,000 people to talk to, all with useless information.
-Drudging through sewers.
-Random encounters in low level areas (Yet another reason Earthbound was awesome)

I actually can't really think of anything in genres that are common in the genre, just problems with particular games.

Indeed, when it come to talking to 10,000 people in order to find out what to do, its like a historian sim: peicing together snippits of information gathered from sources to come to a conclusion. Only unlike Historian the game, it simply doesn't make any sense because in reality people arn't just like a bunch of artifacts waiting to be deciphered so its just completely unintuitive and unsatisfactory. Why do games continue to do this? Why do people like this? please, i need answers!

Let's see...

Non-linear game environments with extremely linear objectives.
They're kinda missing the point on this one. The whole point of a non-linear world is to have a million things to do. When you only have one mission marker on the map...it gets a bit dull.

Also, "traps" in multiplayer FPSes. Quicktip: THEY NEVER WORK.

Zillions of collectibles.

God damn you, Super Mario 64, for opening that floodgate! God damn you to hell!

stompy:
Actually, I don't know if this is common in FPSs, but I utterly loate respawning enemies (no Infinity Ward, it's not a good idea). That, and the random encounters in JRPGs.

- A procrastinator

Bad Stompy! Bad! Stop putting that at the end of every firggin post!

I dislike MMORPGs that make you think they are normal RPGs. Seems to me that there's a lot of this going around lately. I'm thinking of FF-XII especially. If i wanted a grindtastic grindgame about grinding and grinding some more, i would buy World of Warcraft. But, as "I don't have a copy of WoW, because I have a life" (quote from the WoW episode on South Park), I don't like getting one wearing normal RPG clothes.

It's like meeting a girl at a party, you take her home, she takes off her clothes, you think "yess!"
And then you find out it was a drag queen all along...

Escort missions. Especially since what you're escorting is generally programmed with the survival instinct of someone with ADD crossing an eight-lane highway.

HalfShadow:
Escort missions. Especially since what you're escorting is generally programmed with the survival instinct of someone with ADD crossing an eight-lane highway.

I would agree 99% of the time. The only counterexample I can think of is the AC130 mission "Death From Above" in COD4.

BEST. ESCORT. MISSION. EVER.

In MMORPGs, I can't stand insecent farming to level up, and that's what's turned me off game after game in the past. Lots of those games start out fun, but once you get to higher levels, killing 4k + enemies just to keep going really doesn't add up.

in any genre with a jhump button other than platformers, having to make a jump that is the maximum possible length of your jump, even worse if the floor periodically falls away and comes back.

I dislike MMORPGs that make you think they are normal RPGs. Seems to me that there's a lot of this going around lately. I'm thinking of FF-XII especially. If i wanted a grindtastic grindgame about grinding and grinding some more, i would buy World of Warcraft. But, as "I don't have a copy of WoW, because I have a life" (quote from the WoW episode on South Park), I don't like getting one wearing normal RPG clothes.

It's like meeting a girl at a party, you take her home, she takes off her clothes, you think "yess!"
And then you find out it was a drag queen all along...

I couldn't agree more.

Another CRPG mechanic that really pisses me off these days is the tendency for very "original" but convoluted levelling up methods, especially those that make it very easy to permanently hamstring a character if you don't evolve him the "right" way.

Paying for stuff. I just spent 5 hours saving your sorry ass from a bunch of critters and how am I repaid??? Oh we'll sell you a bunch of stuff you need. Gee thanks.

Bosses back from the dead.

'nother vote for games which fail to incorporate the 'jump' button.

Idiotic writers who fail to include some sort of reason for doing side-quests other than a bit of money (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect!). Chrono Trigger and bleeding FFX-2 did it right by having at least some character development in there; why can't modern games?!

Quick time events and FPS's that have no extra head shot damage. Or worse, only having headshot damage for certain weapons (halo series I am looking at you!).

Was going to put critical hits from TF2, but for every time its had me screaming in rage its also supplied an "oh my god I survived" moment as well. So its probably the perfect game mechanic...

When a side-quest off the back of some spurious tale of ancient treasure sends you through he hordes of hell and back again, only for the treasure to be two medkits, a grenade and a brick and represent about 1/5 of the resources you expended getting to it. I've never been bothered by random encounters but some crime boss leaving 126 guards and a menstruating ice dragon to protect his Chesney Hawkes autograph causes me to twitch with rage.

Programmed for Darr and Stompy have neatly summed up my feelings on spawn points in FPSes. In silly blastathons like Serious Sam I can accept them as just something to stop your PC crashing when 2000 bad guys show up at the same time, but Project IGI with its empty barracks that become infinite Speznats (did I spell that right?) dispensers when the alarm is tripped? In a game that goes to such lengths to be 'real-world', I have to wonder which military organisation recommended the practice of sending their soldiers out in groups of three every twenty seconds to go and stand on top of the bullet-riddled bodies of the last eight batches. Also they can summon soldiers out of thin air because when you actually go inside the barracks there's never anybody there but you can be damn sure SOMEONE will pop out and shoot you in the back five seconds after you leave.

Ooh! How could I forget? Really fast, leaping monsters that can kill you with one hit. My first encounter with the mutant gorillas in Far Cry Had me screaming abuse into my tear-stained keyboard after about twenty five unsuccessful attempts. Grr.

-Nick

Those fucking button mashing things in games like God of War. I hate having to press circle really, really fast in order for something to happen on the screen. I can't get past certain parts of God of War I and II because I siply can't press the buttons fast enough. I would much rather have QTE's.