#3 Musical Score
The problem: The game's score lacks identity, or worse becomes annoying during the course of playing the game.
Major culprits: The Settlers of Catan, Tiger Woods 07, College Hoops series
Avoidance: Creating or outsourcing for better tracks or scores from fully qualified musicians. Every successful television show, movie, and video game has an excellent musical score. This is not some mysterious coincidence, music helps drive the games' drama and emotion. Music behind games like Halo and The Legend of Zelda: WindWaker, it's confounding why more developers haven't tapped more of their budget to find quality scores outside their own development studio.
#2 Balance
The problem: Multiplayer matches are dumbed down by the inclusion of super weapons that can be exploited during the entirety of the match.
Major culprits: Halo 2, C&C Tiberium Wars, Madden series
Avoidance: Major weapons with high reward should carry high risk when using them. This is usually not the case as sniper rifles are generally easy to use, super weapons are easy to build, and sports NPC's never fatigue. Without true balance, gamers generally default to using exploits even if they disagree with the method.
The problem with exploits is that they usually only allow one side to have an advantage over the other, thus players devolve further to learning how to cheat the cheaters. This higher leaning of cheating keeps new players from enjoying the game, and withers away the mainstream base; which generally leaves a small percentage of hardcore players. This support for this small composite of players is most likely too high which means that the developer wither starts to fix the game (Bungie) or they pull the plug on support (Ubisoft). Either way a good game, and 24-30 months of development go down the toilet, because the game was unbalanced.
#1 Auto-Aim
The problem: Some idiot somewhere thought it would be intelligent to let anyone auto lock on to opposing players and NPC's without trying, thus defeating the purpose of playing the game.
Major culprits: The Halo series, COD 4, and every other FPS on the market.
Avoidance: The problem with Auto-Aim is that it doesn't require skill or talent. Skill and talent should be needed to use different weapons or skills. If games don't require patience, balance, and skill, then matches basically boil down to one player holding down the trigger longer. Eroding the gaming experience down to a bunch of idiots on-line holding down the right trigger for hours upon hours.
Though many developers feel that their game would be less commercially successful if they left Auto-Aim out. It's not necessarily a fair assessment; the SOCOM series developed by Zipper Interactive was successful in it's first two iterations when it lacked this feature in multiplayer matches. Though it still was in the game during it's single-player missions, via codes, the exclusion of aim-bots in multiplayer actually made the game a commercial success.
If you want to make a warm and fuzzy game for the kiddies with Auto-Aim that's fine. However, if you're targeting a hardcore audience with plans for a large multiplayer base, then it's something you must exclude. Auto-Aim takes the fun out of the experience and reduces the quality of the game; if this medium is to be respected then it should gain that respect based upon the requirement of difficulty and patience.
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