It's good that you mention Skyrim because I do happen to have a similar beef there, and the basis for it is precisely because I think my expectations are pretty reasonable.
Skyrim has an enchanting system where you can reduce the mana cost of spells by a percent value. It isn't terribly difficult to get to the point where you can cut the cost of casting for a school, say, destruction, to zero, and have free spells forever after that. This is pretty game-breaking, and doesn't even get into the level 100 enchanting perk, which doubles the number of enchantments you can have (would you like 75% magic immunity to go with your infinite spells?)
I find this to be poor design, plain and simple. It shows a big disregard for balance, and the reason it annoys me so much is its not hard to fix: make the enchantments increase spell damage/duration instead; or reduce the strength of those enchantments so in total they won't hit 100%; or put a hard cap that these don't stack past 80%; anything, really, that doesn't cause a player to get to that point, run around killing everything for an hour, get bored, and quit.
This sort of thing is pervasive. The pickpocketing tree, for example, is worse than useless - it'll actively harm your character by causing you to level if you pursue it, leading to stronger opponents without an increase in power to match them. And so on. Plain and simple, it looks to me like whoever designed these systems put a minimal amount of thought into them.
Which brings me back to Minecraft. The core components of Minecraft - the mining, block placement, and the simple progression it has are very well done. So are the plants, animals, and environment. But the vast majority of the other stuff just isn't. Beacons - very cool idea. Too bad you have to kill a couple hundred wither skeletons to get the skulls to make a wither to get the main part for it. Enchanting - an entire system constructed out of grinding and chance. The Nether - I remember on release that if you made a portal and went to the nether, it would make a new one on your return instead of sending you to the one you'd constructed. One of the selling points was the ability to travel long distances in the overworld via the nether, and yet the portals wouldn't even tie to each other correctly!
My point isn't that Minecraft (and Skyrim for that matter) aren't great games; they are. And Notch is a cool guy; I have a lot of respect for him. But. Tossing random stuff into the game (mooshrooms?) and having poorly designed systems with clear fixes is what I expect from a 16 year old modder, not a mature game dev (and this goes double when a lot of the worse systems were implemented after Mojang was incorporated; QA testing? Second opinions? Where were these? Am I missing something?)
Skyrim has an enchanting system where you can reduce the mana cost of spells by a percent value. It isn't terribly difficult to get to the point where you can cut the cost of casting for a school, say, destruction, to zero, and have free spells forever after that. This is pretty game-breaking, and doesn't even get into the level 100 enchanting perk, which doubles the number of enchantments you can have (would you like 75% magic immunity to go with your infinite spells?)
I find this to be poor design, plain and simple. It shows a big disregard for balance, and the reason it annoys me so much is its not hard to fix: make the enchantments increase spell damage/duration instead; or reduce the strength of those enchantments so in total they won't hit 100%; or put a hard cap that these don't stack past 80%; anything, really, that doesn't cause a player to get to that point, run around killing everything for an hour, get bored, and quit.
This sort of thing is pervasive. The pickpocketing tree, for example, is worse than useless - it'll actively harm your character by causing you to level if you pursue it, leading to stronger opponents without an increase in power to match them. And so on. Plain and simple, it looks to me like whoever designed these systems put a minimal amount of thought into them.
Which brings me back to Minecraft. The core components of Minecraft - the mining, block placement, and the simple progression it has are very well done. So are the plants, animals, and environment. But the vast majority of the other stuff just isn't. Beacons - very cool idea. Too bad you have to kill a couple hundred wither skeletons to get the skulls to make a wither to get the main part for it. Enchanting - an entire system constructed out of grinding and chance. The Nether - I remember on release that if you made a portal and went to the nether, it would make a new one on your return instead of sending you to the one you'd constructed. One of the selling points was the ability to travel long distances in the overworld via the nether, and yet the portals wouldn't even tie to each other correctly!
My point isn't that Minecraft (and Skyrim for that matter) aren't great games; they are. And Notch is a cool guy; I have a lot of respect for him. But. Tossing random stuff into the game (mooshrooms?) and having poorly designed systems with clear fixes is what I expect from a 16 year old modder, not a mature game dev (and this goes double when a lot of the worse systems were implemented after Mojang was incorporated; QA testing? Second opinions? Where were these? Am I missing something?)