Your worst gaming habits

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Inspired by a recent thread, where I've posted the following:

I have trouble finishing games even when they make me lose sleep in the beginning. Once the interest slips away, I can't keep going. There are games where I've started +30 characters and couldn't finish with any of them.

Believe it or not, some of my favorite games are in this category (Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Arcanum come to mind). Instead of just playing the game normally, I keep starting characters until I find one I'm satisfied with. Often this results in early exhaustion, or the game becoming too easy too soon. In that case, obsession with a game can turn to zero interest in a matter of days.

To the above, I'd also add:

Way too much time looking up, researching and testing mods, although I only do this for a certain kind of game (do I need to say... Gamebryo?).
Making mods for my own enjoyment that I never release.

I'm curious to know what other weird, indefensible and self-defeating habits other people have when it comes to games.

 

[Maxie]

i sometimes can't be bothered to figure out the character building if the system is new to me and just walk around with unspent levels getting fucked by hostile wildlife

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

i sometimes can't be bothered to figure out the character building if the system is new to me and just walk around with unspent levels getting fucked by hostile wildlife

Chad behavior.

 

[Baron Dupek]

I keep starting characters until I find one I'm satisfied with

used to have that habit, then it stopped few years ago for some reasons

 

[Cyberarmy]

I loot everything and search every container.
I hoard everything like a dragon and seldom use scrolls and such.
I cheese encounters everyway that I can.
I search every nook and cranny of maps, which is the most boring part of nu RPG era, because of shitty designed maps...

 

[Falksi]

If I'm playing an RPG, I'll drop out every 45-60 minutes to watch porn for a few minutes. I just love fit women with big tiddies and fine bootox.

 

[VerSacrum]

For me it's also terminal rerollitis until I burn out instead of finishing at least one playthrough and never using my consumables.

 

[Iucounu]

I loot everything and search every container.
I hoard everything like a dragon and seldom use scrolls and such.
I cheese encounters everyway that I can.
I search every nook and cranny of maps, which is the most boring part of nu RPG era, because of shitty designed maps...

That sounds like a good gaming habit, founded by playing older better games. It's not your fault if maps in newer games are shitty. Maybe your worst gaming habit is using good habits in games that don't deserve it?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

hoping the next big game is going to be good.

 

[NecroLord]

I rage a lot when I screw up or die.
Gotta calm down...

 

[Catacombs]

Reading books, scrolls, letters, papers, etc., with the idea I'm missing a quest if I don't find it written down.

Hoarding non-equipment items. Learned the hard way in DOS I & II when I needed a quest item I accidentally sold several dozen hours earlier and couldn't remember which merchant (or NPC) I gave it to.

 

[Lord of Riva]

I like to read guides about the mechanics of the game and lose myself in Theorycrafting instead of actually playing the game

 

[processdaemon]

I'm a binger, I'll go months between games but once I start one I really like I find it hard to put down until I've played it enough times to see everything I want and it eats into my sleep/ social life. That's not a problem for games that I can bang out in a weekend, but any 100+hour RPG with branching paths that require replays means nobody is seeing me outside work for at least a month.

 

[Just Locus]

I tend to hoard up a ton of miscellaneous items that hold little or no value, until a certain point in my playthrough where I just go back and go "Why did I grab this again?" and discard it.

I am also a tad bit of an autist when it comes to playing games as I like to explore every nook and cranny of most games I'm interested in (I greatly appreciate replay value), and so it results in me testing small things like jumping animations or looking in locations that didn't look explorable or just simple fun like holding an object and tossing it around like a child who just developed object permanence lol

 

[hrmo]

I pause the game and leave it on the menu screen then walk away for 3 hrs to eat or do something else, then I come back and realise the game's still running. So now my playtime counter is fucked and I have no idea how long I've actually spent playing the game.

 

[Faarbaute]

More relevant to RPGs than anything else, but I used to leverage my own personal abilities to the degree that it would make games too easy, invalidate character progression, and so on. I've learnt to chill out over the years, though.

 

[Zlaja]

Constantly re-checking my inventory every few minutes to make sure everything is in order and that valuable stuff in there has not mysteriously vanished.

 

[Gerrard]

Stopping a game halfway through or later, and then I hate picking up from such a state months later, but I also don't want to restart so it just sits there unfinished.

hoping the next big game is going to be good.

Wish I had your optimism.

 

[Nutmeg]

Getting addicted to games that aren't even that good because they're so comfy e.g. the amount of time I spent with Total War, or recently playing the interesting but very unchallenging Gemfire

 

[luj1]

metagaming too much

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Wish I had your optimism.

i wish i didn't. it's just needless pain. every time.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Playing 4X or grand strategy games, getting bored with the time crunch and clicking on super ridiculous speed way too much. In the end it causes me to miss important messages, lose a quest option, or even lose a whole campaign. A while back I was playing Grand Tactician and I was out west screwing around with the Missouri operations, so I got bored waiting for some units to get done building and increased the game speed to 20X. Within just a minute or so the Confederates back east had sent a small army up the Potomac and captured Washington DC, because my eastern armies were moving southwest to go around towards Richmond and weren't even around to defend the capitol.

And that went into my second worst habit. Restarting games when I retard myself into a loss because I was being an impatient bastard.

 

[Angnomynous Wasp Scholar]

I'm too thin

 

[Jürgen]

I tend to hoard items as well and over-prepare reading some guides (or watching Youtube videos) before getting into a game. Also, I'm into achievements and such making some games needlessly frustrating.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

I tend to only play shit I've already played before these days, usually stuff from my teen years that I have a strong attachment to, because looking at whatever other game that gets recommended by friends saying "You need to play this!" usually has me thinking "This looks incredibly generic." or "Just looks like a shitter version of X" where X = a game I liked from my past.

It takes me a long time to work up the desire to actually learn to play some new game's system or to even put myself in the right mindset to make a start. I just don't care enough about finding new games anymore and the periods of time between the end of one big RPG and beginning another get longer and longer as I get older, which makes it easier and easier to just fall back to my old haunts, since we're talking years between playthroughs anyway. I find it a tiresome prospect to dump 60-100 hours into some RPG just for it to leave no lasting impression on me these days, and more often than not, that's exactly what happens regardless of how new or old the game is.