This game that sometimes you can’t stand and get so mad over, but still like and want to play. For me it was Warface. Totally P2W shooter with bad lags. Part of the reason I kept playing it was due to old PC and no money for games back when I was a teen. It was still pretty good at launch though.
It was on Russian servers, so was a horrible P2W, which sometimes created a funny situation when you pick up a lootbox weapon from dead enemy and go on killing spree killing all of enemies without much effort, then get cussed out in the chat. Yeah, game had absolutely OP weapons which you could get only from lootboxes with real money. Yet the shooting mechanics somehow had some enjoyable element to it.
I remember playing Warface back then when it was only accessible through the GFace social network. It was really cool back then but it turned P2W very quickly.
I think the game I hate and love at the same time is EVE Online, I love watching videos of it, reading all of the stuff and learning how things work, but at the same time I get triggered just a week after playing every time. Too much pay2win recently…
Then another space game - Elite: Dangerous, which has amazing procedurally generated yet accurate galaxy, the sound design is amazing and it overall feels awesome, but there’s no content and the game is kinda anti-social, I would like to see more players, trade with them, create corporations, etc… this is all impossible and the networking solution (peer2peer) is complete crap.
Diablo 2. i played some D1 and really liked the game as a whole, but when i got to D2 (which was pretty late after the expansion), i couldn’t shake off the feeling that something is wrong. i kept restarting and abandoning the game for years. eventually i found out several things: the “real” game was lost and a hastily reverse-engineered beta had to be released as a final product; the whole dev team was burned out and the code was a mess, so the fixing took years and was never finished; players demanded a faster game, so eventually the progression became much faster, but in a somewhat roundabout way, which created a massive gap between two kinds of players - those who played to progress and those who played to experience the game overall. so, after playing the game for this long, i can’t see anything but flaws. tried some mods, but very very few steer the game closer to being an adventure and away from being a loot grinder. and those that do aren’t perfect either.
Pretty much every Elder Scrolls or Fallout game. The jank, the convoluted dungeons of Daggerfall, the overall meh that was Skyrim. But I played them all and for way longer than most other games in my collection.
I hated Alien vs Predator 2010 because of how unfinished, terrible netcode, and hacker filled the PvP was…but I loved it because it had Aliens against Marines, the Alien movement transitioning from ground to walls was so smooth…and the marines were so heavy and clucky yet could hold their own if you followed some simple does-don’ts. Catching Marines and Predators unawares as an Alien was so satisfying. Feeling both vulnerable but strong as a Marine was a thrill.
I put a ton of hours into PvP…but eventually the lack of anti-cheat and the problematic netcode/high latency just ended it for me. As with most games, no other game comes close. Natural Selection 2 had some similar experiences but I just wanted an arena style game.
Lineage 2. So much same type, boring, disheartening, monotonous, dull things. So much ass pain while getting killed by high-level player-killer. And so much fun with revenge, PVP, wars and even hapiness from successful sharpening.
i played on some unofficial server with some double digit progression rate multipliers. was a relatively fun experience - but for me it was mostly about evolving my class. i really liked how i could chose what to spec into every few levels. same feeling in Firefall TBH.
Global agenda a game from hirez it was one of my fave games at one time.
The things i hated was how certain things such as AvA short for Agency vs Agency was not expanded or really changed much.
It got somewhat boring after a while most people only wanted to do this to get the flair helmet/armor with holographic details.
The PvE was actually fun there was so much potential for that game if they just focused on that and instead went with PvP, PvE, AvA and eventually the game was abandoned.
Then Firefall arrived and that was another game i loved particularly the vehicles and the sounds, the environment and the npc’s had some wonderful personalities which added to the charm.
The game had some humor and it wasn’t trying to be ultra serious all the time either.
My only regret was not discovering all the places and bosses however perhaps i will be able to with Em8er/respark someday!